


The Devil in Creation

by Defira, Serindrana



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, Forbidden Romance, Horror, Illnesses, Imprisonment, Unresolved Sexual Tension, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:47:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ferelden is dying. A Blight stalks its cities and its highways, and only an interim government is left to keep order. Where armies have fallen, bands of mercenaries and refugees now haunt the old keeps and the abandoned skylines, and one lone scientist has hope for a cure.</p><p>The only headache is the soldier on his trail. A soldier determined to uncover his secrets, and determined to make his problems her own. With the future of the country hanging in the balance, neither of them have time for distractions. Nothing has ever been more problematic. </p><p>Well, that and the fact that he might as well be the walking dead himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**_Soldier's Peak, 15 Haring, 9:30 Dragon_ **

The outer perimeter alarm went off, the silent flash of the orange light above the laboratory door accompanied a few seconds later by the rumble of his phone vibrating across the desktop. He swore, and rolled the lab chair across the aisle to one of the other computers, stabbing at the power button with more force than was necessary. The screen slowly turned from black to a more familiar blue; while it loaded he tugged open the bottom drawer of the desk and hunted about for something to arm himself with. The Glock was out of ammo, and he shoved that to the back, digging under the empty boxes until his fingers closed around the Beretta.

The screen flickered and awkwardly powered up; he dumped the gun on the desk and set to work, pulling up the security feeds with his override. The computer hummed noisily and froze for a moment; he kicked it with his foot and the images flowed again, grainy and indistinct. He scrolled through screen after screen, hunting for movement, pausing when he found the breach.

Three figures, somewhat indistinct and hugging the shadows, coming in from the Dryden street entrance; their gait was even, and they moved with the precision of a well-practiced squad. They were all noticeably armed.

Not darkspawn then.

Worse.

“Bloody fucking Maker,” he muttered, making note of where they were- _east wing, ground floor ward, three minutes to escape_ \- as he lunged back towards his bench and began grabbing at all the loose sheets, all the calculations, all the formulae and the breakdown in behavioural patterns, everything he’d cobbled together on this godforsaken virus over the last few months-

The second alarm went off, the red light on the wall stuttering into life. Inner perimeter breach- they knew where they were going, and they weren’t wasting time. He ran along the wall and kicked out the power cables, the constant drone of the computer monitors, his only company these past six weeks, dying behind him. He left the last one and dashed back to the bench, pulling up the security feed again.

They were inside, north-east stairwell: _one minute, ten seconds_. Fuck. He was about to kill the power on the screen when one of them looked up at the security camera and he froze.

Female. Tall. Dark hair. A face that jumped out at him, sang recognition even if he couldn’t put a name to-

Wait.

She’d been _there_. She’d been… head of security, or something? With the secret service, maybe? That fateful day, when his whole life- _what was left of it_ \- had been turned upside down, she’d been there. He remembered, because someone had made a joke about women in uniform, and he’d looked up to see her staring across the lab at them. Back then, he would have sworn she'd been staring at _him_. And maybe he’d preened a little, thrown her a wink, because pretty girls didn’t come walking into the lab every day. She’d scowled in response and gone back to standing to attention behind the VIPs, her hand held very carefully on her hip and close to her gun.

That same taut control was in action as she gestured for the two men with her to sweep the hall, weapons held at the ready. He watched transfixed, even knowing in the back of his head that every second he wasted was a second they were drawing closer to him. She was thinner, and her face was lined, but the last few months hadn't been kind to anyone. At least she was still alive.

That was more than some people would say for him.

Common sense and self-preservation finally kicked in when he heard the crack of the rigged door being attempted, and he snapped into action. He had booby trapped all the doors on this floor, one last ditch effort to give himself time to escape should the need arise. This seemed like a fairly definite case of need. He powered off the screen, then knelt and wrenched open the casing of the computer. A few cables to disconnect, and then he tugged the hard-drive free and threw it into his open backpack. As he headed for the window, he snatched up the Beretta and tucked it into his belt.

It was going to be a close escape, but he’d be damned if he’d let them all catch him now. He knew what reaction his physical appearance was likely to get- _shoot first, ask questions later_ \- and he wasn’t going to let anyone, not the Chantry, not the interim government, stop him from trying to fix what this research had wrought upon the world.

He was going to stop the virus, or die trying.

And maybe somewhere along the way, he'd die _properly_.

He could hear footsteps in the hallway as he slid open the window; he paid no attention to them as he clambered out onto the tiles of the sloping roof. Maybe next time they wouldn’t send a pretty girl after him, and he wouldn’t have to waste precious seconds staring at a computer monitor. He snorted, a sort of inelegant laugh, and slid carefully down the roof and into the night.


	2. Chapter One

**_Blackmarsh, 2 Bloomingtide, 9:31 Dragon_ **

Growing up a half a day's drive southwest, her classmates had always told stories about how the Blackmarsh was haunted. There was an old hospital there, they said, where the patients had been tortured. They told her, crowded around atmospherically tilted flashlights or sloppy camp fires, that it had been shut down years ago but that sometimes, you could still hear the screams. The souls of the doctors' victims still howled when the moon was full and the fog was thick.

She had known three kids who had gone there on a dare.

They'd come back the next morning muddy, scared, and filled with boasts. And so she had ignored the stories from then on, because if three children could escape such a place so easily, there was no real chance of it being haunted. Cauthrien had never been given to superstition anyway; there were things far more real to worry about, like her father's unemployment and the chronic food shortages in the wake of the long conflict with Orlais.

She supposed, looking down the broken pavement that bisected the county, that she still had things far more real to worry about. She had a hundred thousand things bowing her shoulders and threatening to break her. But there was something deeply unsettling about stepping foot in an area that had been all but abandoned long before the Blight, and there was something deeply unsettling about intending to steal from the dead.

They were all long gone, she reminded herself, and resituated her helmet. Keying the engine, she pulled away from the shoulder and headed in deeper.

The old hospital was an hour's drive away, leaving the main road halfway through and crawling up narrower roads in worse condition. She was forced to abandon her bike half a mile out, when she could see glimpses of the clearing and the grounds through the bare branches. Cauthrien looked back to where she had left it every few minutes, though she knew nobody would take it. There was nobody here _to_ take it, after all.

But the fear remained.

The building itself was broken down, windows smashed in and ivy tearing apart the mortar. She checked her pistol before she climbed the stairs to the main door, and checked too the sword at her hip and the truncheon beside it. A quick touch assured her that her nose and mouth were still covered and that her protective glasses were still in place. And then she checked her kevlar and-

She had to go in.

Taking a deep breath, she shouldered open the door, pulling her sword free. Swords didn't need ammo, they only needed skill.

And skill was something she had been forced to gain.

She stole into the entryway, leaving the door open behind her only a moment. Shutting it left her in deep shadow, left to navigate the leaf litter and left over odds and ends by touch. The hallway that stretched away before her had only one window at the far end, the light it let in milky through the clouded glass. She hesitated for a moment, letting her nerves settle into place, calming her breathing, taking in the desolated building. Dust hung thickly in the air around her, floating in the weak beams of light that made it through the cracks in the old doors. 

The paint on the walls and ceiling was flaking in great chunks, and she toed a piece lying in her path. It was heavier than she expected, and she flipped it over, revealing a substantial piece of plaster from the roof rather than just a fragile shard of paint. There was graffiti on the walls, scrawled tags that clearly meant something to someone, pointless acts of false bravado- she couldn’t help but think of the three kids in her class, creeping out here in the dead of night.

None of it helped her shake her nerves, only adding a stubborn patina of superstitious worry.

Her hand shifted on the hilt of her saber. It felt awkward still, even with a few months of practice behind her. The weight wasn't like that of a gun and it wasn't the same as her fists. She tried to ignore the difference.

Outside of a defended area, distractions could mean death. Even here, where the virus surely couldn't be active with nobody left to carry it, she couldn't let her nerves catch her up. She frowned as with each step she felt something she couldn't quite place. There was a thrumming somewhere beneath her feet, but she pushed through the feeling, moving quick and low, close to the wall. It was a trick of the mind.

At every door, she slowed, and with her heart hammering she rose up on peered through the glass, wire-reinforced and thick. She was met with dark, empty, ruined rooms, with at most drop cloth-covered equipment and furniture.

All she needed to get were supplies. The IV medicines had likely all gone bad, this long without refrigeration, but the dry should still be good if this place really had been occupied by a small clinic a few years before. She wished again that they had found some paper trail to back up that rumor. How long did it take for a place to begin to look like this? Had the clinic really not repaired the windows, or were they all broken again? It was a crap shoot.

Even Maker-damned _ibuprofen_ would be worth it, but there was hope for antibiotics, for anti-emetics, for blood thinners and clotting agents. She only wished she had more than basic triage training. She'd know better what she was looking at, and for, and where in a hospital she might find it.

She cleared the first floor, finding a few promising stashes. They'd have needles, at least, and back boards. She radioed the rest of the team and told them to bring in the van from where it was parked a ways out, to conserve gas in case it was all a bust.

And then she looked at the nearby doors down to the basement. _Basement_ , where there wouldn't be easy ways out if she encountered darkspawn, and she could have sworn she heard some moving beyond the windows. _Basement_ , where all the storage likely was. _Basement_ , where it would be pitch black.

She reached up and lit the flashlight attached to her vest shoulder, and opened the door.

The thrumming finally turned to a noise, and she frowned - she knew that sound. _Generators_. She hadn't noticed exhaust on the way in, but she had been so damned _focused_...

Fingers curling and flexing on the hilt of her sword, she began moving down the stairs. Who would be in a ruined old hospital like this? Who would have the generators going? It didn't look like a marauder base, but it certainly wasn't a functioning clinic.

___

They had never been properly decommissioned, rusty old diesel leviathans that lurked in the basement of the old Blackmarsh hospital; for anyone with any technical know how, it was childishly easy to get them rumbling back into life. Given that he'd been tinkering with his dad's old Lincoln before he was even eight, the generators were no challenge at all.

Conserving the fuel in them was another matter, as was the noise they put out. Thankfully they were two floors underground, so anybody would have to be inside the building to hear the faint hum of the turbines. There was a tell tale trickle of black smoke from one of the stacks whenever the wind died down, and that was problematic- it told anyone within a radius of at least a mile that there was something to be found lurking in the halls of the old building. And the fuel was going to be the bane of his existence, because the supply in them was limited. Granted, he didn't see himself hiding out here forever. Just long enough to finish his research and find something conclusive to fight back against the virus.

Although every day he was here was a day longer than he wanted to be.

To conserve power, he only used the one room, down in the basement near to the generators so it wasn't a trek if something went wrong and he had to repair them. He'd dragged all the equipment he'd been able to find down with him - thank the Maker for the dumb waiter, because he didn't have the strength to get some of the computer terminals down the stairs - and for the most part he was able to work without interruption. The occasional darkspawn staggered across the grounds, lost and disoriented away from the main horde, and usually easy pickings if he needed a new guinea pig. Other than that, he was completely alone.

His iPod was playing music quietly in the background as he examined a new set of slides, increasing the magnification as he sought any kind of change in the cellular structure. The virus squirmed under his gaze, and he amused himself by pretending it was horrified at being caught and confined, and not at all that the mindless organism was simply hunting for a new host within the confines of the glass. But no change to the cells, nothing to indicate his latest attempt had been any more successful than the dozens of others he'd tried.

He swore under his breath and sat back from the microscope, pinching the bridge of his nose as if warding off a headache. Not that he really got headaches any more, but this was enough for habit to kick in as if one were forming. This was so much harder than he'd been expecting. The damn thing had been easy enough to build, and he knew it inside and out- why couldn't he then take it apart again, find a way to destabilize it, ward against it, kill it?

Frustrated, he got up and went to the tiny bar fridge that he'd found in the staff lounge and dug out one of the saline packs from the vegetable crisper. He knew they weren't supposed to be cold, but it wasn't like there was anyone around to lecture him, and it felt nice, the cold flowing through his ruined veins. He tweaked the sound on the music, turning it up to soothe his wrecked mood, and sat back down on the stool, tourniquet already in hand. Back when this had all started, he'd been shit at this, but it was second nature to him now: strap around the arm, wait for the sludge that resembled blood in his veins to rise, needle into the vein, wait a few seconds, strap off, needle taped down, saline flowing and _Maker_ that felt good.

He waited for the flow to settle, the cold slithering through him until he almost shivered, before pulling up his laptop and beginning the arduous task of inputting the results from the newest failed test.

The song switched and he didn't bother turning it down. He was petulant enough not to care today. The saline was going some way towards soothing ragged nerves, but in all he was feeling remarkably off center. The cause wasn't anything he could put his finger on... although another failed experiment was sure to bring his mood down again. If he was capable of getting drunk anymore, he would have made good use of the old, half finished bottles of whisky and gin that he'd found in a few of the doctors' offices when he'd set up camp here. As it was, it was good for using on wounds, and for sterilizing his equipment, and not a whole lot else.

He was tweaking a graph, adjusting the chemical ratios on the formula he'd tried this time. The difference on the line was almost minuscule and he sighed in frustration. There was a lull in the music, a break between chorus and bridge, and it was just quiet enough for him to hear a scraping noise somewhere overhead.

Like a door opening far down the hall.

He froze. The music surged again and he lunged across the desk and hit the pause on the iPod. The room fell silent but for the whir of the computers and the distant hum of the generators. He strained against the silence, his hand creeping up his arm and tugging free the needle, the saline solution spilling down his skin. There was the vague sensation of discomfort, not quite pain, his nerve endings too far gone for real twinges, and he tugged open the top drawer and snatched up the surgical tape and a cotton bud, ripping the tape free with his teeth. He pressed down on the oozing wound, taping the bud firmly over the top and hoping it would settle by itself.

There were no other sounds, and he told himself he was imagining things. It was an old building, and sometimes old buildings made noises. But he couldn't believe himself, not today, not when his nerves had been shot to hell for hours. He didn't believe in a sixth sense, but whatever the Void he had was warning him that something was wrong. He took a deep breath and peered out through the little glass window on the door-

Just in time to see a flashlight beam hit the wall on the stairwell several feet away.

He swore, and then silently cursed himself for a fool, nearly clapping his hand over his mouth in annoyance. He could hear footsteps now, and of course whoever was out there would see the light spilling from the window panel and _shit_.

He couldn't have made this worse for himself if he'd tried. Trapped underground, only one door, and that door was very quickly being descended upon by _someone most likely unfriendly_ ; likelihood was that they weren't coming over for a cup of tea. He spun about, looking for his gun- _Maker_ , the fucking thing was empty, where had he put the bullets? _Shit_. He remembered trying to clean it, the last time he’d tried to get himself a lonely little spawn staggering across the grounds and instead getting gunk all through the barrel when the stupid thing had attacked him; had he really not put the bullets back in after that?

It wasn't like he had time to find them now, so as a last ditch attempt he shoved it into his belt and lunged for the gas tank he kept by the fridge and wrenched on the lever, feeling the cool hiss of pressurised gas flowing against his open hand.

___

She approached the door at a low crouch, flashlight off now that she could see light spilling from the room. _Light_. Light meant a person. Darkspawn didn't use lights, didn't use generators, and they certainly didn't hide. Slowly, she sheathed her sword and reached for her holster instead.

She'd get a read on the room, and if it looked too dangerous, she'd back off. If not- if not, she needed to know what was in this place, and the assistance - willing or unwilling - of something else would speed things up.

Maybe she should have turned around and left, but the fascination with who could live in such a place outweighed her penchant for nerves.

She reached the door, shoulder to the metal, and she straightened up just enough to peer through the reinforced glass. _Light_. Computers. One figure.

One.

One was acceptable risk, especially with his back to her. She checked her gun: round chambered, safety disengaged. She settled her finger alongside the barrel. And with a deep breath, she reached for the latch, edging the door open as quietly as she could, entering with her gun trained on the-

The-

_Man?_

Her jaw clenched.

"Stay right where you are," she said, her voice steady even if she didn't feel quite so sure herself.

___

He stiffened; the intruder was _female_. Oh fucking Maker, of all the emasculating things to go through on a day when he was already pissed to high heaven at his lack of progress, it had to be a _woman_ that crept down here and flushed him out of his hidey hole. It had to be a _woman_ who would manage to sneak past his guard and make it this far into the building without him realizing it. It had to be a _woman_ who would be forced to look at exactly what it was he'd become, the very reason that he didn't keep mirrors around at all. No need to remind himself just how low he'd fallen.

And now he had to watch her face twist with disgust when she saw him. He clenched his jaw, trying to pretend that he didn't care. Who was she to him, anyway? Some dumb scavenger bitch - _who caught you because you were careless, you dumb shit_ \- who he would never see again once she looted his lab of anything useful.

_Be a man. Even if you're not much of one anymore._

He took a deep breath and turned around slowly, keeping his hands well out to the sides in case she had a twitchy trigger finger. And felt his mouth drop open in stunned astonishment.

Dark hair, and even obscured by the goggles, he could see a face that was familiar- piercing slate grey eyes locking on his-, and _oh Maker_ , not _again_ -

"Fuck, you just don't give a guy a break, do you, Princess?"

___

Her eyes widened, almost imperceptibly. Years of training had made her good at masking her emotions, at least when she held a gun in her hands. But he looked- he looked-

 _Dead_ wasn't quite right. He looked exactly like a darkspawn, except without the festering wounds, the gashes and sores that they didn't notice enough to clean. His skin was tight and drawn, pale in some spots and discolored black or green or yellow in others, mottled bruises that seemed more than bruises. Whatever hair he had once had was reduced to bare stubble, and his _eyes_. She didn't know how he could see with how damaged they looked, irises ragged, sclera discolored.

And worst of all, she recognized him.

She had pored over the security tapes at Soldier's Peak in the days after the raid, trying to catch a glimpse of the man who had been there, who had left scraps of research that they had tried desperately to put back together. She had _seen_ him, impossible and horrific and she had memorized that face, hoping to somehow encounter him on the streets, arrest him and bring him to Uldred so whatever he knew, they could take and use to save everything.

But that wasn't an option anymore.

And instead she found him here, now. Her lips curled somewhere between pleasure and disgust and anger. Her finger wavered. The anger in her, anger that had burned in her alongside shame for a month and a half now, wanted her to put a bullet through his wretched skull.

The rest of her whispered _he might be able to help._

"You've had, what, five months?" she said, trying to find words. Why they were words of conversation instead of intimidation, she wasn't sure. "I suppose you just have bad luck."

She wasn't here for him, she reminded herself, taking a deep breath.

"I need a rundown of the supplies you have in this building." Her gaze flicked to his computers. "... And any research you've been doing."

He sneered.

... Did it smell odd in there? Or was it just him?

"Well," he said, drawing her attention back, "I'm inclined to say ' _no_ ' to both your requests, but thanks for asking ever so nicely, Princess." His thin lips, drawn tight over his teeth, curled into a smirk. "But then, you're fairly persistent when you want to be, it seems, given that you’ve interrupted me twice now. I'm guessing you'll do it with or without my help. So really, thanks _so much_ for asking, but I'm quite happy here."

He slowly crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall, seemingly uncaring of the danger of her gun trained on the center of his chest. "Just so you know," he added with a shrug, "I have a gun in my belt. Maybe you should come get it." His smirk widened. "Can't risk me going for it, after all."

Her eyes dropped immediately to his waistband.

Fuck. He wasn't bluffing. Somehow, she hadn't noticed the gun. With all her blighted training and all her damnable nerves, she _hadn't_ noticed it. She ran through plans, mind threatening to spin out of her control. The van would be another hour and a half, at least, and the others didn't know to come down looking for her. She had to be cautious. She had to get what she needed and get out alive.

"You're perfectly capable of disarming yourself," she said, following him a step closer as she looked up again. His bravado was beginning to get to her. But she needed him, and she needed him alive and cooperative. She steeled herself, scaffolding her spine to keep it straight.

Calm but inarguable. Intimidating. It was second nature.

She narrowed her eyes, shoulders staying square. "I'm a soldier, you're a lab rat. Who do you think will win if you try to shoot me?" Her upper lip twitched and curled in anger before she smoothed it. "Tell me what I need to know, and I'll be out of your... life, again." She would have preferred to take him into custody, but if she could get it all another way- "I might even be able to have aid sent your way."

He smiled and kept his arms firmly crossed. "I'm a lab rat who understands the mechanics of a gun, the physics involved, and exactly where the best places to shoot you are to take you down. I don't need to kill you, I just need to be able to walk over the top of you."

That drew a low growl from her, a warning twitch in her jaw. She could take him down before he could take a step. _Theory_ was different from experience, and it took all her willpower not to comment, not to rise to the bait. That smell was getting stronger, and she blinked rapidly against it, determined to keep her focus.

"So tell you what, princess," he continued, patronizing and snide, and her finger twitched on the barrel of her gun. "I have no intention of working for your precious government, or whoever it is holding your leash at the moment." She flinched, but he didn't seem to mark it. "I'm doing what needs to be done, for the people who have been wronged. I will not allow my research to get bogged down in political red tape and bureaucratic nonsense, so no, I will not give you my work, and I will not take your offer of aid.

"And if you want my gun, I suggest you come and get it. Otherwise you need to leave. Now."

She took a step forward. And then another. "I'm not working for the government," she said, biting back the spilling swarm of doubt and shame that always came with thinking back, or thinking at all beyond survival. "And nobody's holding my leash. We want the same thing, I assure you - an end to all the chaos."

Another step, but when she put her foot down, she felt as if she had nearly missed the ground. Her frown deepened. Her hands wavered. She grit her teeth and tried to concentrate. "I don't even need the original files. I just need what you _know_ , and I need it in more than bits and pieces this time. And I need to know if this place has bandages, has medication that is still usable. People need to..."

Her vision began to blur.

"To know..."

Had it always been so warm in here? She swallowed, thickly. Had the floor always been at an angle? Had he always been so far away...?

_No._

A wild panic hit her, the thought of infection, the coming hunger and violence and loss of everything that was her, and her hands shook noticeably. She blinked rapidly. _No_. She had followed all procedures. She was clean. She was-

It was only her training that made her engage the safety, fingers shaking and barely feeling, before she lost her grip on the gun and went down.

___

He lunged forward as she crumpled, his heart- or whatever organ lurked there now- lurching up into his throat when he saw the panic and the terror in her eyes. _Stupid, stupid, she's got a gun, don't feel sorry for her, she's ruining everything-_

He caught her, managing to use her forward momentum in his favour to swing her around and away from the floor. She wasn't quite a dead weight in his arms, and she struggled somewhat feebly against him. He hadn't touched another human being in nearly six months now - darkspawn did not count - and dead nerve endings or no, the physical contact was... powerful. And immediate. And Maker almighty he could smell her, sweat and gasoline and gunpowder and _woman_.

He shut his eyes for a moment and willed himself to just not notice her.

An impossible task if ever he'd set one for himself. He had a ridiculously frustrating female in his arms and he just had to not notice her. Fantastic. She pressed up against him, and tried to mutter something at him, but her head only lolled a little to the side. Her eyes weren't quite closed and he could see the panic in the dark steely blue depths.

"It's just a sedative," he said, trying to sound calm and soothing. "You'll be fine in about twenty minutes, I just had to get the gun away from- stop that right now!" Her hand slid awkwardly down his hip, an obvious drunken lunge for his own gun, but it was sensation overload, a female hand groping at him- _almost intimately_ \- and he swatted her hand away, keeping hold of her wrist firmly to stop her from trying again. He stared at the roof for a few seconds, counting backwards from ten in his head. "It's just a sedative, you'll be fine. I'm really sorry I had to do that to you, but you left me no choice. I can't let my research fall into the wrong hands, or be stopped for any stupid religious or political or ethical reasons. This virus needs to be destroyed, at all costs."

He was babbling, and he knew it, but he had an armful of woman and he had no plan of what to do with her. He hadn't quite thought this far ahead- or rather, he hadn't thought he'd foolishly stop to catch her. "Okay, well, I'm just going to put you down in the hallway- no. I'll lock you in the generator room, because the darkspawn don't like the noise and you'll be safe there while you recover."

She slurred something, and her head drooped against his shoulder. He gritted his teeth, trying to ignore how surprisingly soft she felt, despite her wiry, muscular build. He could feel her breathing shallowly, little puffs of air that flowed through the mask she wore and onto his skin. It didn't feel nice at all. Not one bit. "And it'll only be twenty minutes or so, and you'll be fine, it's really just a general anaesthetic, and you would only have breathed a little bit in..." _You're rambling, Kris, cut it off._ "You're fine. You're not sick. Don't stress about it."

"Bastard," she slurred, her first distinct word.

"Yeah, well, I've been called worse." He half-carried, half-dragged her from the room, struggling along the hallway with her. She was slightly taller than him, and once upon a time he would have said that that was kind of a turn on- not that he was thinking about sex right now, not at all, not ever, not in this wretched half dead body, not even convincing himself- and he labored until he reached the generator room. He flipped the light switch and eased her down onto the floor beside the door, crouching down beside her. She still looked disoriented, and he took her chin in his hand and tilted her head back, checking her eyes to make sure she was still okay. Her pupils were huge, and he sighed. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? Clearly your bosses, or whoever you're working for, think they're onto a good thing by sending a pretty girl after me, but please, I'm begging you, _just stop_. I need to work, and I can't keep moving labs like this. You have to leave me alone."

She mumbled something, and he clapped her awkwardly on the shoulder. "You've got your gun, and you'll be locked in," he said, gesturing for the door. On a whim, he patted her down, ignoring the way his previously unresponsive body leapt to life at the feel of curves under his palms. He found a set of keys in her pocket (though he had to look away while he dug them out) and he tucked them into his own pants. "And I guess this is goodbye for us, Princess. Please don't follow me again. I can't stress that enough."

And then he left her there, tugging the door shut behind him and immediately running both hands over the stubble on his head. It was just another reminder of everything he'd lost to the virus, but he had no other idea what to do with his hands. "You idiot," he snarled, stalking back towards his lab and beginning the arduous task of dismantling it yet again. And the whole time, he couldn't help but notice that his clothes now smelled of gunpowder and woman.

Maker, he didn't even know her name. 

___

When she came to enough to realize she had come to, to do more than roll onto her side and curl up or loll onto her back and stare at the ceiling, she was alone. There was no other sound beyond the humming of the generators. She stayed still and tried to think, tried to piece together the little snatches of what felt like dreaming.

He'd carried her. Somewhere in that body that appeared half-dead he had found the strength to drag her down here, put her down, and-

And babble. Had he said so much? She remembered _princess_ and _pretty girl_ well enough to make her scowl, alongside pleas not to follow him. _Follow him_. She didn't know who he was, except some strange, deformed vigilante scientist who broke into labs and worked alone. She hadn't wanted to find him.

But she had. And now that she knew he was still alive - assumedly - and still working to stop the virus, she couldn't simply leave him be.

She rolled onto her front and pushed herself up. But all she managed at first was staggering forward; she barely caught herself against the wall, gasping for breath. Her stomach roiled and threatened to empty itself, and she closed her eyes, trying to breathe. _Not sick_ , she told herself. _Just a sedative._

All she had to do was take it slow and easy up the stairs, out the door, and get back to her bike. She had water there, and the fresh air-

... He'd taken her keys.

The memory flashed back bright and she snarled, crouching and grabbing up her gun and lurching towards the door. If the darkspawn were out there, she shouldn't stagger into their waiting maws - but dammit, he had her _keys_. She fumbled with the door lock and fell across the threshold, scrabbling for the frame or anything at all to keep her upright. She ended up bowed against the wall, shoulder to it, and she led herself hand over hand down the darkened corridor. Halfway down she remembered her light; it still worked, and it gave her enough to see by that she was able to drag herself up the stairs, and back out.

The cold, fetid air of the swamp hit her full in the face and the smell of botanical rot made her retch, dry-heaving while her head spun. But the clearer air also steadied her as soon as she caught her breath again. Down the path, back to the road-

Back to the road-

Her hands caught on branches to keep her moving forward, and every step made things a little clearer. He'd smelled of nothing much at all, she remembered, except for dust. His words kept repeating, what few she could remember. _The bastard-_

She reached the road and swore aloud.

Her bike was gone.


	3. Chapter Two

_Vigil's Keep, 23 Solace, 9:31 Dragon_

Cauthrien sat with one headphone pressed to her ear, frowning as she listened to the report. Another potential sighting, this time in Denerim. The last had been in what remained of Redcliffe, too recently for him to have traveled so far. Her contacts were seeing ghosts, and while she didn't know what the man she was looking for was, she knew he was very much alive.

But two months of searching, putting old contacts and former fellow soldiers on alert around any place with a derelict hospital or research lab, had turned up nothing. She had followed the first few leads, hopeful and determined and against her employers' wishes. She had turned up nothing, though the supplies and materials salvaged from the labs seemed to set her bosses at ease.

Now she sat and waited, and instead of feeling like a spider in the middle of its web, she felt lost, grasping at threads that slipped through her fingers.

That man, whoever he was, held hope for a cure. And he also had her bike, a thought which dragged at her pride and made her fingers twitch.

"Cauthrien!" Garavel called from behind her, and she set the headset down, tossing back two pain pills with a glass of boiled and filtered water that tasted flat and dead. She didn't need him _and_ a headache.

"What do you need?"

Garavel had never worked for her before, but his small-scale organization was the one she had fallen in with after her face had been plastered all over the news as a traitor, and after Teagan Guerrin's interim government all but collapsed when the power grids went down. He was a nice enough man, with some degree of military training, and the worst jobs he let her opt out of.

"For you to get off that damn headset," he said. "You're not going to find this fucking phantom, and even if you do-"

"I'm off it," she said, standing up. "Is there an actual job?"

He shrugged. "I need you to head out with a team to Dragon's Peak, drop off some goods for me and wait for an exchange."

She quirked a brow.

"Fuel for weapons."

"That's a shit trade."

"That's why you're going to kill the blighters once we get the fuel." Garavel smiled grimly. "Doesn't sound so hard. You're used to shooting people in the-"

"Shut it."

She dragged a hand back through her hair, pulling the tie loose and then rebinding her ponytail, tighter than before. Her throbbing temples didn't appreciate it, but it made her feel more in control and less likely to snap in anger. Her past and her choices were her own; she didn't need Garavel's smart-ass commentary.

"So, Dragon's Peak. Where in?" It was another city with another fortified post outside of it, perfect for fending off darkspawn, but it had been abandoned for months.

"Main city, west side, an old government armory," he said. "We tried to take the armory for ourselves before this group moved in. Didn't work so well."

"Do we have maps?"

"Of course we have maps."

"I want maps, and I want to hand-pick the team." She crossed her arms over her chest. "And I want weaponry beyond a pistol this time. And the armored van. This isn't going to be pretty, Garavel."

"I know. That's why I'm sending you in, niceify it a little." He shrugged and she grimaced.

 _Princess_ crossed through her mind. She shoved it aside. "Right. When am I leaving?"

"Tomorrow morning."

Cauthrien nodded and dropped back into her seat. "I'll be out of here by dawn."

"Good," Garavel said. "And stay off that damn _headset_ , woman. I don't like you playing side games."

She dignified him with a grunt, then turned back to her work.

_How many hospitals and labs in Dragon's Peak?_

___

_Dragon's Peak, 24 Solace, 9:31 Dragon_

The drive up the mountain had been tense. Tense, uncomfortable, and lacking in suspension, and whenever they hit a bump or swayed on the road, Cauthrien had weathered the momentary flash of _I'm about to die_. It was a distressingly common feeling these days, and that she could ignore it at all said unpleasant things that even she could note.

But this was tenser still, and _I'm about to die_ played on loop as she surveyed the field from where she sat atop a nearby building, stretched out on her belly with her scope trained on the opposition leader.

They were meeting too close to this guy's base, she thought as she watched him shake hands with Colbert. It was going to make dropping him and escaping with any ease next to the impossible. Grimacing, she leaned to the side and raised her binoculars to survey the rest of the group. Four men that matched her own, well-armed and ready for a fight. Fidgeting. Nervous. _Very_ nervous, she thought as she spotted one man's urine-soaked thigh.

She frowned and looked to the armory itself, to the people lingering there-

A flash of movement, fast.

_Fuck._

She keyed her earbud. "It looks like we have Runners," she said. "Back by the armory. Get ready to go."

" _Roger,_ " came the hushed reply from Maverlies. " _I see them too, boss._ "

Cauthrien growled low in her throat and settled behind her rifle once more, steadying it. The building she was on was secure - door behind her barricaded shut, fire escape ladders drawn up. But down there, in the warren of buildings… it had seemed quiet enough when they had come in, but where there was one darkspawn, there were usually more.

Another flash, and she turned her gun towards the armory - but not before catching one of the opposition looking back, nervous and startled. He didn't move, didn't run. _Not running_. That meant…

That meant they knew they were there.

Cauthrien's lips twitched in a feral grin, and she keyed her earbud again. "Their base is blown," Cauthrien said. "That's why they didn't come straight out the door earlier. They've got a containment problem. That might be all there's left."

She trained her rifle back on the leader.

"Blow them," she said, and fired.

Chaos erupted down below, shouts that were silenced quickly by well-placed shots. Lifting her head she saw another flash, and then she heard the distant sound of shattering glass. The too-familiar, blood-chilling howl of darkspawn filled the air, and she chambered another round.

"Get the fuel back in the van, we'll get the weapons later," she said. "Go!"

She got a darkspawn in her sights, what looked like something that had once been a woman, and a single shot dropped her. Cauthrien kept her breathing steady. _Reload. Aim. Fire. Another_. There were more coming, and she whispered a prayer to a Maker she didn't entirely believe in as Maverlies and Colbert defended while the others loaded the van.

There was a loud crash and boom as Maverlies threw a grenade down the nearest alley, and then the _rattatat_ of Colbert's AK. More howls. _Reload. Aim. Fire._ She'd always been a good shot, but sniping had been something she had truly focused on only after she had lost her position in the army. She was meant to command, to sit in the back of a truck and listen to incoming reports, to lead teams in. Being so removed-

But somebody needed to be. She picked off another two darkspawn, grimace rictus-tight and unchanging. They had maybe half the fuel loaded, and so far nothing had gotten within a hundred-yard radius of the van. This part of the city was all but deserted, but that meant people in their homes were below, those who had barred the doors and tried to survive. Then again, if the armory had fallen, it was likely that whatever protection they offered had failed, too, and the people - she tried not to think about it.

Another one. Two misses. She swore.

She watched as one broke through the unofficial perimeter, charging Colbert and catching the man with its one remaining arm, blood oozing from its damaged and festering gums. Colbert shouted and Maverlies fumbled with her pistol, trying to aim. She wasn't fast enough or sure enough, and Cauthrien gritted her teeth. _Not her business._

Her business was the others filling the roads, picking off from the majority. She heard a shot ring out, and fought the urge to glance.

" _Colbert's down,_ " Maverlies' voice came.

"I heard," she grunted. "Get on that truck."

" _Sir-_ "

"I said get on that truck. Once it calms down you can come back to me. I have rations up here, I'll be fine."

_Reload. Aim. Fire._

" _Yes, sir,_ " Maverlies said and began backing up, firing a few more times before she reached the van. All but one barrel of gas had been loaded.

"Leave it," she ordered.

"Yes, sir." Maverlies hopped into the back of the truck, banged on the roof, and they were off.

Cauthrien sagged and loosened her hold on her rifle.

No sense in wasting ammo just yet.

___

He didn’t think much of it when shots began to ring out in the streets below. Dragon’s Peak wasn’t just lawless these days: it lacked any kind of social order at all. It was wild anarchy, desperate people living desperate lives in a world that had stopped caring about them many months ago. He hadn’t wanted to remain anywhere too close to a settlement, anywhere close to people, but he’d gambled that the Sighard Pharmaceuticals labs would have something salvageable in them… and he had to face facts: attempting an isolated setup hadn’t really worked in his favour the last two times.

So he’d gambled on the drug company, and the gamble had, well, sort of paid off. It had been looted of anything even vaguely resembling medication months ago- probably when the first of the troubles had begun, and news of the virus had caused panic and rioting across the country. It certainly wasn’t left in any kind of order: cabinets smashed open, offices ransacked, empty drug containers strewn across the floor with papers and broken glass. But he was getting particularly good at improvising when it came to a lab setup, and he had his own makeshift chemist kit in his bag these days. What he really wanted, what he was really hoping to find in Dragon’s Peak, was equipment. The kind of fancy, top of the line laboratories on television shows, all white and sparkling with silver bench tops and machines that wouldn’t be out of place on the set of a sci-fi.

And he got it.

The looters hadn’t known the value of the machines and for that he was ecstatic. He hadn’t had a good lab to work in for years now. Soldier’s Peak had been his first real position after university, and it had been a posting he’d fought tooth and nail for, just for the honour of working under a brilliant mind like Doctor Avernus. But where the university had been affiliated with the sleekest, most up to date hospital in all of Ferelden, Soldier’s Peak had been a decade out of date, clean and well-run but with equipment that had seen better days. Avernus was eccentric and set in his ways, and although he could have had a Chief of Medicine position anywhere in the country with just a phone call, he chose to work up at Soldier’s Peak Hospital instead. He was a master of several fields, but specifically his expertise in virology had been intriguing enough to sway Kris’ hand when he’d been considering where to apply for a fellowship.

And look where that passion had got him. Alone and bitter, not quite sure if he was dead or alive most days, hiding his face from the world while he worked furiously to undo the horror that something he himself had helped to build wreaked upon the world.

They’d never intended it to happen like this. At first, they’d just been working on the principles of symbiosis, and the beneficial relationship the human body had with numerous forms of bacteria. But Avernus had been so charismatic and sure of what he was offering to them: what if they worked with viruses instead of bacteria? A virus, after all, needed living tissue to reproduce in, so they would always have a certain degree of control over it as opposed to working with bacteria. In hindsight it was obvious that the doctor had been manipulating them into pushing ethical boundaries, praising them for things they really shouldn’t have been doing, soothing their fears when they’d felt uneasy enough to voice their concerns.

And Avernus had clearly been working outside of office hours, tweaking experiments, changing data on the graphs and the projection tables so that nobody noticed immediately. Nobody noticed until it was too late.

It was easy to see it now, in retrospect, and blame himself for it. Wonder if he could have stopped it, or delayed it, if he’d been paying attention.

“And if wishes were fishes, they’d fill up the sea,” he muttered as he carefully pressed down on the syringe, introducing his newest attempt at a vaccine into the suspension of the virus in the petri dish. He heard the crackle of gunfire again and glanced at the window, shaking his head as he set the syringe down and slid the dish back under the microscope. He adjusted the scope, humming under his breath as he increased the magnification.

The infected tissue was responding somewhat positively to the introduction of the serum. But even as he watched, the reactions began to slow, the cell lysis speeding up again and the viral replication destroying the antibodies in the liquid he’d introduced.

He sighed and sat back, lifting the dish out from beneath the scope and nudging open the fridge by his knee. He slid the petri dish onto the prepared tray, and closed the door with his foot, levering out of his chair and stretching lazily. Another botched attempt, another week wasted. The gunfire came again, the sharp retort of a high caliber weapon and he glanced over at the window with a little more interest. He meandered over to the window and peeked out from between the venetians, looking to see what the source of the disturbance was.

He could see a handful of darkspawn in a few of the surrounding streets, more than the settlers normally allowed to gather. He had an awkwardly beneficial relationship with the surviving residents here: he’d hacked the power grid for them, allowing sporadic power to flow back into their broken community, and for the most part they left him alone, leaving out fuel for his bike when they had some to spare, restocking his ammunition for him from the armoury. They’d never seen his face- he wasn’t about to be chased out for being a monster, thanks very much- and sometimes it made something in him twist and burn and ache, the lack of contact, the lack of humanity in his life almost too much to bear.

He missed simple things, like conversation, voices, movement at the edge of his vision as someone walked around the room. He forced himself to accept that the distant sounds of the settlement were all he was ever likely to get. And now it made him feel vaguely protective, as if he owed them more than just annoyance at the interruption. It was concerning to see more darkspawn than normal, and he peeled the latex gloves from his hands as he glanced about, trying to find the source of the gunfire.

A flicker of light on a nearby building, maybe two or three blocks away, caught his gaze and he frowned, trying to focus on it. It was too far away to make out, and he fumbled blindly off to the side for his binoculars, pulling the blinds to the side in order to have a better field of view.

He adjusted the lenses, focussing in on the space where he’d seen the small flicker of light bouncing off metal. His eyes kept drifting back towards a particular building, flat top roof a few levels lower than the one he was camped in; maybe a hint of movement, just enough to catch his attention. Most of the settlers holed up underground, and movement up high was unusual. Even as he watched, he saw the muzzle of a gun appear over the small retaining wall, and a spark of light as the weapon fired; there was a slight hesitation as the sound bounced towards him, a momentary delay with the distance.

Someone pinned down by the spawn? He frowned and increased the zoom on the binoculars, waiting to see if the sniper made a move. Surely if someone in the settlement was outside there would be others…

He shifted his gaze down to street level and cursed under his breath when he saw the bodies lying still on the asphalt. They wouldn’t stay down, chances were; only a matter of time before the virus worked its way into tissue not quite dead and not quite alive.

 _Fuck._ Something was wrong, very wrong, and he swung the binoculars back up to the sniper’s position. Was the sniper pinned down? _Stupid question Kris._ Even as he watched, he saw the gun move, and suddenly there was a face leaning over the wall, peering down at the street with a look of thinly veiled disgust.

He nearly dropped the binoculars.

“ _Princess?_ ” He stared, and he tried to tell himself he was imagining it, but there was no mistaking it: it was the woman from Blackmarsh and Soldier’s Peak. The woman he hadn’t stopped obsessing about for weeks, wondering if she’d been okay after he’d left her locked in the basement. The woman that he completely hadn’t been obsessing over for all the wrong reasons, especially not the way his withered, dying body had responded so eagerly to her being so close. He certainly hadn’t lain awake at night remembering how she’d smelled, alive and wonderful.

And now she was here. Maker Almighty, the woman clearly had a vendetta against him. Granted, he’d taken her bike- and a fine piece of machinery that was- and she’d probably deck him the moment she saw him for that, but this was uncanny. Three times in six, seven months? How in the Void did she keep finding him?

She fired the weapon twice and ducked out of sight; he swore and dropped the binoculars on the bench, stalking down the aisle of the lab.

“No, just no, she’s fine, she’s got a gun, you don’t need to go and play hero.” He heard another shot, and winced. What if she ran out of ammo? “Maker Almighty, you need your ammo for yourself! Don’t think she’s gonna appreciate you riding in on a white stallion to save the day.”

He couldn’t fight himself for long. Chivalry and guilt and curiosity won out in the end. What if she was here with the express purpose of looking for him, and died as a result of it? He’d never forgive himself, even if she was only here to ruin his research again.

Two minutes later and he was taking the fire exit stairs two at a time towards the roof. He slung his M16 rifle over his shoulder as he broke into the hot summer air, tightened his utility belt as he neared the edge of the roof, and then took a flying leap towards the next building. He stumbled to his knees as he landed, _oomphing_ in discomfort from the pressure- not quite pain, his body too far gone to feel something as sharp.

Panting, he staggered to his feet and looked around. Right. Only several blocks to go. Although there were no buildings close enough to her vantage point for him to jump from- damn. He’d have to go street level after all, at least for a time. He checked his belt, found the necessary vials, and nodded grimly. He’d have to risk it. Maybe he could get as close as possible before hitting the street, and then find some way to get inside? Maybe there was a fire escape ladder? Although knowing Princess, she’d probably covered that contingency and he’d have to find a workaround.

Wait.

_Knowing Princess?_

He didn’t know her; all he knew was that she had a gratingly annoying habit of turning up at the most inappropriate times. He didn’t even know her name. And yet apparently he was about to hurl himself down into a street full of darkspawn just to rescue her… when she may in fact not even need rescuing.

He was the king of good intentions, and the emperor of bad decisions.

He ran straight at the edge and kept going.

___

She'd given up on taking potshots; thinning the crowd would do little if the sound of her gun brought still more darkspawn, and if she wanted a rescue she'd have to give them an easy way in.

It left her uneasy, though. She didn't like them simply milling, waiting, hunting.

Easing away from her rifle, lying propped on one hip, she checked the pistol she had holstered. _Ready_. Another visual check, and she knew where she had put her sword and truncheon. _Ready_.

She'd heard thudding some ten minutes before, distant and dull, but she hadn't been able to identify the source. It had stopped, leaving her with only the damnably hot sun and the prowling of 'spawn below to accompany her fraying nerves. 

A shout from the other side of the door to the roof made her swear and turn, shoving herself up to her feet. She made out the words, if not the nuances of the voice- "Howdy, princess," the voice said. "Your knight in white shining armour is here."

_Shit._

She stared back at the door, then dropped into a crouch, edging away from the drop off and her rifle. She had been prepared for eventual beating on the door, howling maybe - or Maverlies' voice. She hadn't expected-

_Him._

Her heart stuttered in her chest. The hunt, over. The hunt, _done_. She'd gone through the motions, checking possible locations for him here, but she hadn't really expected him to be in Dragon's Peak. The memory of him in the Blackmarsh came rushing back, overwhelming and heady. Her body draped against his, her hand going to his belt, _Princess-_

She'd been searching for him for two months now. Two months and _nothing_. And now she was stranded on top of a building and he came to her rescue?

The Maker had a sick sense of humor.

She took another deep breath. She certainly wasn't in need of a rescue. Once the darkspawn dispersed, her team would come back for her. He was still as pompous and grating as the last time, if his greeting was anything to go by, and she really wasn't in the mood to open that door with 'spawn still prowling the streets.

But this might also be her only chance to get him alone and listening.

She keyed her earbud. "I think I have a way out. Get someplace safe. I'll get in contact later."

" _Yes, sir_ ," came Maverlies’ response.

Cauthrien nodded to herself and approached the door. That thudding- had he been crossing rooftops? She abandoned the thought as ridiculous. No, it had to be something else - a way of distracting the 'spawn, maybe.

Pressing herself against the wall beside the door, she checked her gun again. _Ready._

She cleared her throat. "My knight with chloroform rags, you mean?"

If he was going to antagonize her, she'd give back as good as she got. The memory of falling helpless against him still rankled, even through her determination to find him again.

"Now now, princess,” the answer came, all but sung through the door, “is that any way to greet your champion? I would have thought you'd be swooning over me for saving you- are you telling me that none of my sordid fantasies are going to come true?"

She grit her teeth. "None of them," she said, flatly. Sordid fantasies- _Maker_. He certainly had a very strange opinion of her. She rarely got this amount of harassment from anybody who knew she had any combat training at all. She scowled at the door. "Any reason I should trust letting you through this door? For all I know, you've come to shove me off the building. Or offer me up to the 'spawn as a sacrifice."

He sounded smug, or at the very least unconcerned with her accusations. "Well, here's a thought- you are very much aware that there are plenty of darkspawn out there. And you also know that I'm working on a vaccine, because you keep trying to _steal_ my research."

"I-"

"Let's consider," he pressed forward, either not hearing or ignoring her interruption, "the fact that I somehow got through those darkspawn to come and get you, a fact that I'm sure interests you to no end. How many other people do you know who can just stroll through the horde unscathed? You wanna get out of this building, Princess, you have to put up with me and my sordid fantasies. Trust me, I'm the last person likely to throw someone to the darkspawn."

She felt a spasm in her jaw.

The bastard was smart. Of course he was- but lab smart and people smart were two different things. He seemed to have at least some amount of both.

"And if I have another way down, that doesn't involve submitting myself to you?" She itched to open the door and finally get a shot at making him cooperate, either with pleas or a fist, but yielding- yielding seemed like too much. Yielding seemed like losing. She closed her eyes a moment and tried to think.

He didn't respond at first, and she was glad for the respite.

And then he spoke again, with less humor but the same amount of maddening arrogance. "If you had another way down, Princess, you wouldn't be sitting up there all by your lonesome wasting bullets. But you are, and you are. Means you want to thin the numbers, cause you're worried about being overwhelmed. Which means you're not expecting a pick-up any time soon. Which means you have to be my safety buddy- always travel in pairs, and make sure you tell the teacher where you're going." His voice dropped so soft she could barely hear it. "Although we could ditch the class, when no one is watching."

She bit down on her retorts - all of them. That she had a plan, that she was more prepared than he gave her credit for, that she knew what she was doing, that she didn't need him- and that she wasn't interested in any of his ridiculous innuendo.

_Focus on the cure._

That was why she had sent out tendrils looking for him, listening for him. It hadn't worked, damn it all, but here he was anyway. Within reach. All she had to do was open the door.

"If I agree to go with you," she said, slowly, "what's your plan?"

"My plan." She heard a low laugh, possibly uneasy. "My plan. Of course I have a plan. The plan is to get you out of here. Because I'd really like you out of my town, and out of my life. Because I have work to do, and I'm kinda sick of you interrupting me, Princess. So I'm gonna get you out of here, and you can have your bike back, and never come back again. Sound like a plan?"

"No. Not really."

Killing her would be the easier way out of all this. At least he drew the line at that.

She leaned heavily against the wall. She had to think quickly, had to stay on top of all of this. "As much as I would very much like Calenhad back, I'm not particularly excited about the prospect of being kicked out of this town on my own right now. A day, two tops, and my ride gets here. Besides," she added, gambling, "I don't want to interrupt your work. That's not why I've spent two months looking for you."

"You've been looking for me?" he said, and hesitated just slightly. It was just the tell she needed. "Now you're making me suspicious."

She shifted her weight. That answered one question - she'd missed him because she'd missed him, not because he had been actively dodging her.

"I've had a few contacts keeping an eye out, looking in to any potential lab space in a few cities. I didn't think to ask anybody to check here, though." One of her hands left her gun to touch the doorknob, her toe nudging at the barricade she'd built to wedge it shut. She hadn't been able to lock it - roof doors always locked from the _inside_ , irritatingly enough, and she'd had to break the catch - but right now it was stable.

She took a deep breath. "I'm not planning on running you out of your lab or shutting you down. I tried to tell you that last time. It stands."

"Okay, Princess, you wanted to find me, you found me.” Irritation laced his tone now. “You wanna see my lab? You can see my lab. But none of my offers are any good if you don't trust me enough to open the door. If you want me to get you out of here, you have to give a little. Trust goes both ways, Princess."

_Trust goes both ways._

She didn't trust him as far as she could throw him. But she did want to see his lab, did want to try to negotiate, so she took a deep breath and shoved the barricade aside with a strong kick.

"Last thing," she said. "Stop calling me _princess_."

And then she opened the door, slowly, one hand still on her pistol.

He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed casually as if he was standing at a bar, looking just as dead as he had the last time.

"Well, sweetheart," he drawled. "If I'm not allowed to call you Princess- which is a shame, because it's been a nice name for you these last few months- then what name are you gonna give me? Need something to yell out after all." He paused a moment, thin discolored lips curling into a lazy grin. She felt herself flush and bristle. "You know, to yell out when a darkspawn appears behind you of course. To warn you."

She bit down a snarl, but her fingers stayed immobile and her gun stayed at her side. "Don't watch the news much, do you," she said, eyebrow twitching from her barely restrained tension. "My name's Cauthrien."

"Cauthrien?” He made a show of looking bored. “Name means nothing- but it's not really like I've been watching a lot of TV these last few months."

Small blessings. "And you?" she asked. "Or do you just go by unholy shrieks?"

It struck at a nerve, apparently. He smiled, but it was thin and tense. "You, sweetheart, can call me Justice. It's what I'm hoping to achieve here, after all. I might as well name myself for the virtue I'm emulating. Either that or you can just pretend it's my superhero name."

Cauthrien snorted. "Right. _Justice_."

She passed her hand over the top of her head, smoothing any loose strands, and then she backed up, gaze flicking to her set-up. "It'll take me maybe five minutes to get this all put away. Stay where I can see you. And disarm yourself."

She wondered, as she dropped to a crouch beside her rifle and holstered her gun again, if she should tell him he was conversing with what amounted to a war criminal, a traitor, and likely, in some eyes, a mass murderer. But if one person in this Blighted world didn't know- maybe it was better that way. Disingenuous, yes, but she was working for marauders and mercenaries these days. _Disingenuous_ didn't seem to compare. And he hadn't asked.

He was watching her as she set to work, and she kept an eye on him as best she could, watching for movement.

"Well?"

He shrugged. "Disarming myself isn’t actually top of my priorities, sweetheart," he said in what sounded like disgust, glancing over his shoulder at the M16 slung there. 

“I wasn’t _asking_ ,” she snapped, feeling her temples begin to throb.

"Oh, of course, my mistake.” He sketched a bow in her direction. “I'll just tip dozens of rounds of ammunition all over the floor. I don't need them for the darkspawn at all. And how am I supposed to keep my hands where you can see them when you don't make the effort to watch? Need me to come over there and tuck them in your pockets or something? That way you at least know where they are. But then of course if my hands are in your pockets, I can’t empty my gun, sooo... awkward decisions."

"I can see you there," she said, disassembling everything with far more force than was necessary. She could see him - mostly - from the corner of her eye. "Just come around so that you're facing me, please. And if you can't take off and set that fucking rifle down without spilling ammo, then you shouldn't have it at all. Stop being an ass."

It was the voice she'd used on new recruits, a year or more ago. It was the voice that said _don't fuck with me_ that didn't require posturing or breathing fire. Her hands stilled and she looked at him levelly.

"And if you make one more comment about screaming my name or grabbing my ass, you'll be down whatever _equipment_ you still have left."

Because she really didn't need that on top of everything else. She didn't need the mockery of it if he was just trying to get a rise, and she didn't need the insistence of it if he already _had_ a rise.

He had taken her Maker-damned _bike_.

"... Oh." She wondered if he would have flushed with embarrassment if his blood still ran. "It's just, in the movies, when someone says to disarm, they usually take the ammo clips out as well, or the bullets. Maybe if you'd just said put the gun down? Would have saved us all this time and heartbreak."

Cauthrien stifled a groan.

"And do I get to pick it up again when we leave? I mean, I'm quite happy to walk down there with the 'spawn, they can hardly sense me. But you're like a buffet, just waiting to be-" He faltered, and she tried not to imagine what he might be thinking of. "Eaten,” he finished lamely, uncomfortably. “Because that's what they'll do. So, hey, it's up to you, I'll walk right by them, unarmed, unable to help you..." 

She glanced up. "... I'm not sure if I should risk it, if all your gun education comes from _movies,_ " she said, then shook her head. "Just stop arguing. It's pointless and is accomplishing nothing aside from pissing me off. Though it's almost a moot point, now."

Cauthrien looked back over the disassembled rifle, nestled back in its case, then nodded. She closed it and reached for her small sack of rations and water, strapping that on, and then rose, holding the assembled kit.

"Lead. _Justice_. And sure, take your damn gun."

He sketched another exaggerated bow. Her jaw clenched. "Your white knight, awaits, Pri- Cauthrien." He went to turn for the door. "It would probably be a good idea if you covered up before we headed down," he said, gesturing to the mask slung around her neck. "Eyes too, if you have glasses or something. Trust me, I'm a doctor. Well, actually, no I'm not, not like a GP, that was supposed to be a joke, but... just cover up Princess. It's a little crowded downstairs."

Cauthrien's scowl turned to a grim half-smile, and she nodded, tugging up her mask and fishing her safety glasses out of her back pocket, settling them over the bridge of her nose.

She missed the days when she could work in a wifebeater. _Especially_ in the summer.

She kept close to him as they passed into the building, kit slung over her shoulder now and hand on the hilt of her sword. It wouldn't be as fast as a gun at dropping 'spawn, but she at least wouldn't have to count ammo.

"How far is it?" she asked as they hit the first landing. "To your safe haven?"

"Far enough," he said with a grimace. "Are you fit, Princess? Fancy climbing with that gun slung over your shoulder? Cause it's much safer if we can get on the roofs."

"Nearly twenty years of military life. Yes, I'm fit," she said as she kept up with him.

He went down the stairwell carefully, easing around each corner. The building was blessedly empty, their footsteps and her breathing echoing, the dust motes crawling through the air as he led her towards an open window.

She rolled her shoulders. It'd be a tight fit with everything she had on her, but she didn't want to take it all off, hand it all through, and then put it all back on - it'd take too much time. She'd just have to trust that he'd pull her through fast if she got caught.

And she just had to not get caught.

She watched as he slithered through and only got his gun caught on the frame once. As soon as his feet were on the pavement, he turned and held his hand out to help her through.

It wavered.

She moved and settled her hands on the sill. She tested her weight, then paused, looking at his proffered hand. It was gloved, but she still glanced up to him, at the stark discolorations and the peculiar way his skin sat.

And then she levered herself half through the window, clasped his hand tight, and dragged herself the rest of the way through.

___

She landed mere inches from him, eyes locked on his, and she didn't let go of his hand.

He was staring, he knew, but she was staring back.

That was fairly significant. He wanted to swallow, but he didn't want her to see how unnerved he was. He wanted to smile, but he didn't want to ruin the moment, because dammit this was as close as he'd been to another human being in- _two months, when she collapsed in your arms_ \- far too long, and his body was _doing_ things, stirring, flesh prickling as blood tried to trickle back into cold, dormant tissue. Was his heart pumping again? Maker, he could actually feel his cheeks tingling, as if he were _blushing_.

Maybe she was just holding onto him because she didn't trust him not to run. Maybe it was purely for practical reasons. Maybe she didn't realise that just being around her was throwing him off balance, because just by snarling at him and treating him like a person instead of a creature, it made him feel more alive. It made him want to be alive again- and he hadn't cared about that in over half a year now. He opened his mouth, struggling to say something, anything that wasn't ridiculous, that wouldn't make him look more like the lecherous beast that she clearly already thought he was.

There was a howl around the corner.

They both snapped around to face the sound, hands parting, the moment gone. "Well, Princess, I'd say that's our cue. Follow me," he rasped, and took off down the alley, glancing back to see her following.

They wove between buildings. Behind him, he could hear running footsteps, slowing ones, prowling ones - at least three 'spawn nearby. More than he was comfortable with. More than he wanted to deal with while his hands were still shaking and his mind was refusing to settle. He cursed to himself and searched frantically for the way he had come down.

Finally, he grabbed onto a lowered fire escape and began to haul himself up.

Cauthrien didn't follow.

"What exactly do you expect me to do up there?" she asked, shifting the rifle case over her shoulder pointedly.

 _Fuck_. Not again. Not this needing to be talked through everything. Some soldier she was.

"You need to trust me, Princess." He held out his hand to her. "Sweetheart, you stay on the ground any longer and that rabble is going to come tearing around the corner looking to make friends with your innards. Please, I'm begging you, just trust me- I'm not leading you into a trap."

She was clearly wavering, looking up at the fire escape dubiously; when she glanced back down the street again he took a risk. He reached down from where he was perched and the ladder and hooked his hand through the strap of her kit, hauling her towards the ladder and then up.

"Sorry Princess," he said, dragging her with difficulty up onto the first level: she didn't make it any easier, either. "But you're far too pretty to be a darkspawn."

Just as her feet slid up over the edge, the first 'spawn appeared on the street, lurching out of an alleyway not a dozen feet from where she'd been standing.

She yanked free as soon as she had her feet beneath her again, and he could hear the barest edges of muttering. Below, the darkspawn rushed for the fire escape and Cauthrien crouched, yanking up the first level of ladder just in time. The 'spawn screeched in fury as she backed up.

"Too pretty has nothing to do with it," she said, looking to him. "I'd really just prefer to be alive. So move."

He nearly threw his hands up in frustration. "Sweet _flaming_ prophet, have I given you that much of a reason not to trust me?" He thought for a fraction of a second before amending. "Okay, granted, I knocked you out with gas last time we met, but seriously! It's in my best interest not to be around you. I could have left you on top of that building to rot, sweetheart, or I could have walked straight out into the rabble and let them have at you. I didn't _have_ to come out here and risk my neck for you, so I'm not going to be clicking my heels together and saluting any time soon!"

One of the darkspawn screeched from below, hurling itself towards the fire escape. It hadn't lost much height or muscle tone, and the thing was getting too close for comfort. He fumbled at his belt then pulled free a vial of what had once been an attempt at a cure, and hurled it with more force than was necessary. The glass shattered on the ground, and the liquid inside began to seethe and smoke the moment the oxygen touched it. The 'spawn screeched, enveloped in a cloud of white smoke that burned and paralyzed.

He turned back to her. "So get off your high horse, Princess, and _don't_ snarl at me to move like I'm one of your dimwitted lackeys!"

He didn't wait to see her reaction, too angry to deal with her ice queen commando persona for a moment longer. He took to the second ladder and headed for the roof.

She kept pace, hauling herself and her equipment up behind him. She was long-limbed and strong, and she would have overtaken him if it had been feasible. But she let him lead.

Progress, he supposed.

"What did you just throw down there?" she asked as they climbed, sparing one glance down at the scene below.

"Nothing you need to worry about." He reached the edge of the roof, and without bothering to see if she'd followed, he pulled up a long wooden plank that had been lying flat along the ground. He kicked it across the gap until it rested on the edge of the adjacent building. It was a gap of maybe eight feet, all in all.

"Hope you're not afraid of heights, Princess."

Cauthrien eyed it, then nodded. "I'm not," she said, and was the first one over, never so much as glancing down at the ground below.


	4. Chapter Three

**_Dragon's Peak, 24 Solace, 9:31 Dragon_ **

 

The building he led her to had an old paint job just below the roof: Sighard Pharmaceuticals. It was cracked and fading in the sunlight, but the windows were largely unbroken. The roof door's lock was broken. It opened onto a darkened stairwell, and she followed her guide down.

Now that there was no more running, no more skittering dashes across rickety planks stretched between buildings, Cauthrien could see the unevenness in how he walked. He was tense, his pace brisk, and she half-expected him to glance back over his shoulder at her with every breath. He said nothing, though, and when they reached a door several stories down, he held it open for her.

He didn't look at her.

 _Strange_. It was a definite change, and she wasn't sure what to make of it. Was it the strain of inviting her _in_ , when all he had wanted last time was to get her gone? She set aside the thought for later - she was here for a reason, and she needed to be as aware as in any firefight.

She stepped in through the door and he flicked a switch as he followed. Fluorescent lights flickered on with their tell-tale hum, the polished surfaces of lab benches and equipment reflecting the gleam back sharply enough to make her squint.

Justice cleared his throat and turned to her at last. "Uh, so... welcome, I guess."

Her gaze tracked across the lab, then settled on him once more. She canted her head, crossing her arms loosely over her chest. "So what are you, and are you infectious?" She reached up and touched at her mask. "Do I need to have this on?"

“What I am is none of your business,” he said stiffly, keeping her within his sights even as he turned to tidy up his bench and shuffle the papers out of view. “But no, you can take the damn mask off, if you tell me what in Andraste's name you're doing in my city.” 

" _Your_ city? Have the squatters elected you mayor, then?" she asked, frowning and tugging her mask down. The relatively cool air of the lab felt wonderful on her mouth and jaw, drying the sweat that had gathered beneath her lower lip.

“You have an appalling habit of turning up wherever I dare call home, and I don’t think it’s an accident,” he gritted out, not dignifying her with an answer. “And as if the last two times weren’t disruptive enough, now there’s creepers out in the street. Should I consider that a coincidence as well?”

"We came," she said, voice harsh-edged and pricked, then reined herself in enough that her next words were flat, "for fuel. What we found was the armory group overrun. They'd have been in the streets with or without us."

“How convenient for you,” he drawled. “And I’m just supposed to accept that version of events. It’s not at _all_ suspicious, given your disruptive history with me, or your convenient set up on the roof there. Not buying it, sweetheart. You here for me?”

"No," Cauthrien said. "I wasn't lying when I said I've been looking for you, but I'd turned up shit all." She crossed her arms over her chest. "I was on the roof for a bird's eye view of the trade. We were going to stab them in the back. I was our best shot, so I was on the roof. That's it. When the 'spawn started attacking, I told m- I said they could get out and come back for me when things died down."

One of the sheets of paper he’d been holding crunched as his hand contracted into something resembling a fist. Her gaze flicked to it, warily. “You were going to _what?_ ” he hissed, turning to face her slowly. He was holding a folder tightly in his other hand, as if he meant to hurl it at any moment. “Did I hear you right? You were going to _kill them?_ ”

"I didn't order it," she said. _Dammit_. She hadn't thought a- a whatever he was would have minded so much. "My boss didn't want to give up any of his weapons, but he wanted the fuel."

“Because weapons are worth more than a life, are they?” he snarled, throwing the file down on the table with more force than necessary. The cheap plastic cracked loudly in the large, echoing lab. “Your boss wants fuel, so it’s okay to kill a father? A mother? Leave the children cowering in the bunker wondering if their parents are going to stagger back in and try to rip their heads open? You came looking for my fucking research twice before, and now you’re here again with death on your heels?” His voice had grown progressively louder until he was shouting, and he pointed at her with one shaking, accusing finger. “Where the fuck do you get off telling me that I need to dance to your tune and hand over something that will save lives, when you’re more interested in ending them?”

She flinched once, then remained static, meeting his gaze a moment. One breath. Two.

She let her gaze fall.

 _I have a job._ She wasn't sorry; long years of training had helped with that, followed by months of strain and disappointment and the need to _cope_. "Death will come in time for me," she murmured, then looked back up. "Didn't think you'd be so- attached to them."

“Who said anything about attached? I didn’t even know their names! I just object to the idea of slaughtering innocent men and women for profit, and wondering whether I shouldn’t have just left you up on that roof to be bait!”

"I didn't ask you to rescue me," she reminded him, upper lip curling in a flash of contempt

“Well I did it anyway,” he snarled, turning away from her violently. “And I’m still the monster in the room, despite everything.” He laughed bitterly. “You really know how to fuck my life up whenever you show up. Thanks for that.”

"Trust me," she said, "it's not intentional." _No, I'm just cursed_. She cut the thought off sharply. It didn't help her.

But what _would_ help is-

"What sort of monster are you, anyway?"

“Oh, you know,” he said bitterly, “the type that carries children off in the night to devour, and who demands virgin sacrifices or else he’ll destroy the village. What the fuck kind of question is that? What kind of monster do you think I am? Is this Twenty Questions or something? ‘ _Are you a monster typically associated with Rivaini corsair raids in children’s bedtime stories?_ ’”

Her head was beginning to pound again, and it wasn't from the hours of sun or the slow ration of water she'd consumed. "You said you weren't contagious. Were you telling the truth? Is the lab safe?"

He sneered at her. “Planning on getting close, sweetheart?”

Her cheeks colored only faintly. "If I'm going to be breathing the same damn air as you-"

“The only way the air will be a problem for you, sweetheart, is if you’re taking it straight from my damn lungs,” he said, condescension dripping from every word. “Do you mean to tell me that they haven’t even worked out how it spreads?”

"Bodily fluid contact," she said, flatly. "It was a simplification. I'd like to know just how much I need these goggles, the gloves, for the whole time I'm here."

“‘ _The whole time you’re here_ ’ is going to be all of about ten minutes,” he spat. “Get on the damn radio and tell your minions to come play fetch, I’m not a babysitting service.”

"Then stop going around dragging people off rooftops," she snarled, then reached up to key her earbud. Maverlies' voice came through, dressed liberally with static.

" _Marverlies. Cauthrien, is that-_ "

"Yes. Is the team ready to come and get me? The chaos has died down some," she said, staring at Justice. "You've got a clean shot, though I'm at another location now."

She was met with silence. It stretched on long enough that her gaze threatened to drop, and her jaw tightened even more than before.

" _Ah, sir..._ " Maverlies said at last, then cleared her throat. She sounded- troubled.

"Yes?"

" _We just got word from Garavel. He wants us to pull out with the fuel we have. Mission's over._ "

"Yeah, and I'm _ready to go._ "

" _That's the thing, sir. You moved locations, and we can't drive into that death trap and play pathfinder to get you. He... he said to treat you as a justifiable loss if we couldn't get you out easily._ " She could hear the sound of the truck starting up in the background.

Shit. "Maverlies-"

" _Look, if you can get to the outskirts... If you can get there in fifteen, we can probably grab you._ "

"I can't get out of the city in fifteen!" Cauthrien snapped, turning from Justice and lowering her voice to a frantic hiss.

" _... Sorry, sir,_ " Maverlies said.

The connection died.

She turned around to find him staring at her. When she met his gaze, he made a show of looking around in surprise. “Am I on Candid Camera?” he asked, spinning on one heel. “Is this some sort of colossal joke and the camera crew is going to burst out of hiding any moment now? Because I’m not laughing. And this is suspiciously conven-"

" _Shut up,_ " Cauthrien snapped. "This isn't _fucking_ convenient for anybody involved."

“ _Twice_ now you’ve tried to steal my research,” he shouted, crossing the space between them until she could have felt his body heat, had he been truly alive. “ _Twice_ I’ve had to run, because you’ve come barging in with guns and an attitude, and now I’m supposed to just accept that it’s fate that you’ve fallen into my lap? The poor abandoned damsel, with nowhere else to run, nowhere to turn? Fortuitously trapped with the battered scientist and his notes? I’ve seen that movie before, princess, and I’m not buying another ticket.”

If it wouldn't destroy any hope of helping fix the larger mess her entire home was in, she would have punched him in the throat, the kidneys, _anything_ to get him to shut up. As it was, she could only shake, coiled in barely contained rage.

"Why," she said, lowly, "did you come running to help me, then. You should have just let me starve up there."

“Because I don’t just leave people to fend for themselves against the spawn! I don’t make deals with people and plan ahead to stab them in the back, because unfortunately for me I happen to be a decent huma- decent person." He swallowed thickly. "So maybe _you_ would have left _me_ to starve, but I don’t have that cold hearted streak that you do.”

She flinched again, but pressed on. "And what about the people out there? Do they even know you're up here? Do they know you're working on a damn _cure_ and won't let anybody assist you in your _precious_ research? Because in my experience, people learn you're holding out on them, they get a bit angry. Especially when they look at you and see a monster." Her voice dipped low and rasping at that, and she looked away for a moment.

He actually took a step backwards, as if her words had hit harder than he expected. “No need for the reminder, princess,” he said, voice wavering. “Some monsters-”

"For once, I wasn't talking about you."

“Yeah, well, call the restaurant and tell them it’s a pity party for two now,” he snapped, turning his back on her.

"Make up your damn mind. Either I'm a horrible human being, or I'm not. You seem a bit _conflicted,_ " she said. "Guilty conscience?"

“Forgive me, I’ll be clear then. I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. But you don’t exactly seem like the sort of girl guys take home to their moms. Generally when I think of horrible human beings, someone who admits to killing or planning to kill other people over weapons ranks fairly highly on that list.”

 _No argument_. But responding at all would open her up, even more than she was already, and she felt on edge and fairly flayed from end to end. Her breath hissed out between her lips, and she brought her hand up to her mouth, catching her glove at the back of one finger with her teeth and tugging. Hand free, she ran it over her scalp, fingers clawed just enough to scrape.

Stupid, maybe, but she needed to get herself under control.

"I was looking for you," she said, words slow and tight and measured, "because I _want_ you to find a damn cure. Whatever you think of me, or yourself, or this damned shitshow, I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm not here to stop you, or to destroy your research, or to _steal_ it.

"We've been to Soldier's Peak. We found that research you were working on, back a few months ago. Tried to recreate it. It failed miserably." She shut off the flash of memories, Uldred and Loghain and how everything had broken apart, devolved into chaos. "So I don't want to cut you out of the picture. Got it?

"So believe I'm a conniving bitch if you want, call me a monster, lock me in a damned closet, but listen to at least _that_ , because if you're not willing to, I'm walking straight back out into those streets."

“Whatever I believe about you,” he said, “and whatever you believe about me, you have no right to tell me how to survive this Blight, or what I spend my time doing. If I have a conscience to clear, that’s none of your damned business.”

She would not yell. She would _not_ , not when he was at least speaking in an almost normal tone of voice. She closed her eyes instead, taking another slowing breath, then lifted her other hand to her mouth. The less she looked like a killer, perhaps the more he would listen.

The taste of gunpowder was sharp and acrid on her tongue, but she tugged her glove free all the same, then shoved it and its mate into her belt and spread her hands, pleadingly.

"All I want," she said, "is to help you."

She watched as his gaze dropped down. Shame? Thought? But when she followed the line of it, it led not to the floor but to her splayed hands. He looked at them as if in wonder.

In the alley, when he had taken her hand to pull her through the window, he hadn't wanted to let go.

But he must have seen her watching him. He scowled and crossed to the window with heavy steps, an expression so human, so determinedly _not darkspawn_ that for all her quips and jabs, she had to acknowledge that he wasn't so far gone, after all.

His fingers parted the venetians and he peered down towards the streets. She could hear the occasional screeching yowl, and she focused on each one to try and bring herself back to the moment. It was growing harder and harder each time she drifted.

“I never asked for help,” he said stiffly, breaking the silence that had stretched between them. “Let’s consider this my penance. It’s safer for someone who’s already dead to work on the very thing that’s killing us all.”

"Are you still telling me to get out?" she asked. Their anger, their frustration, had turned quiet in the wake of that meditative silence. There was a resignation to it, at least in Cauthrien, though she thought she could see it too in the set of his shoulders.

“Were this a peacetime, civilian laboratory, there would be protocols in place to keep you out,” he said. “For your own safety, and for the safety of those at work. I’m not precisely sure what you think you’re going to do that would be considered help.” He cleared his throat. “To be quite honest, sweetheart, you’d be more help sitting on your dainty little hands well out of the way,” he said casually, with just enough scorn to drag at her leashed frustration. “I don’t have the time or the patience to sit and explain what a microscope does, or what a petri dish is for, just because you’re curious.”

She frowned. "I know what a-"

“Not interested, Princess!” he snapped, with more venom now. “I don’t need a lab assistant. Nor do I want one. You asked, I gave you my answer, and I’m not interested in a fucking lab decoration either. Get. Out.”

Her eyes widened, the barb unexpected, confusing, and utterly infuriating. _Princess- lab decoration-_

He thought she was useless. No, worse than useless - purposeless.

She left the room at a clip, taking the stairs two at a time while her face burned and her head pounded. He was an ass. An arrogant, defensive, idiotic _ass_. She should have known it after Blackmarsh, but she was sure he knew what he was doing. Somebody who was working on some sort of cure but was so defensive and not coy at all- he had to be onto something.

But she had no idea how to get into it now. She'd blown her chance, if she'd even had one before. Reaching the lobby with its barred and barricaded door, its wrecked furniture, its old blood stains, she found a spot against the wall that was clean and slid down to the ground, knees bent and arms propped on them. She let her head fall back.

She had just wanted to help fix all of this. Was that so much to ask? And now she had been left behind, because why not betray and abandon a traitor?

The first step to fixing _this_ shitshow, however, was to relax. Even a traitor could relax. She unclenched her fists finger by finger, listened to her heartbeat and her breath as it slowed. It was quiet in the lobby, decently secured, and those thoughts helped put her at ease. She was alone. She was alone, but not wholly abandoned, and if she were to go upstairs...

Perhaps he would listen. Perhaps she could approach this a different way.

She couldn't take him back to the Vigil, but she would have to leave somehow. He had mentioned her bike. But she didn't relish the thought of talking him into riding on it with her, and the thought of him pressed tight against her back, thighs against hers, arms around her waist-

Maker. His thoughts were worming their way into hers, and she shoved the image aside, along with the odd little spike of interest that had accompanied it.

So the bike was out, if there was any chance of leaving with him. Which meant some other vehicle. There were cars around, and one thing of fuel left out by the armory. Maybe she could hotwire one- maybe he had the keys to one. And maybe she could sweet-talk him into allowing people to _help_ him, and he'd drive to... to...

 _Denerim_.

Denerim was still mostly stable, as stable as could be with Teagan Guerrin running the place in the absence of a truly functioning state. All the labs were still there and still trying to piece together what Justice and then Uldred had accomplished. She wouldn't be welcome there, and neither would Justice, but it was their only shot. Her only shot.

Or she could leave him here like he wanted, and just- hope. But no. She had put her faith in one man before, and he had nearly destroyed her and the country. No, she had to be involved in this. 

She had to take responsibility.

___

 

She left. She actually _left_.

And he felt like a wretch for making her leave.

Counting to ten didn't work. Pinching the bridge of his nose and pretending he had a headache didn't work. Turned out he actually did have a headache, and pinching at his face? Only made it worse. Picking up an empty petri dish and hurling it at the wall, listening to the crash and tinkle of broken glass, didn't help. Nothing helped the stupid unassailable guilt he felt at having talked her into leaving.

 _Maker_.

He paced. He picked up the broken glass, sweeping it into the bin. He hurled his backpack into his little sleeping quarters, stomping back down the hall to the lab. He sat back down and tried to pick up where he'd left off an hour ago before this mess had started. And he just couldn't do it.

According to his wristwatch, he lasted all of twenty-three minutes before he stalked out of the lab and headed for the stairs. His steps were so heavy and surly that he was sure she could hear him coming from several floors away, but he didn't care. 

“I’m not here to facilitate her death wish,” he growled to himself, slamming the door to the stairwell with more force than was necessary. His body ached from all the exertions he’d put himself through today and he felt irritable, restless, almost feverish. He nearly laughed at that last one, because the virus had already burned through his body and won; he wasn’t likely to succumb to anything anytime soon except death.

He scowled and ignored the headache and kept hunting.

She was hard to find- not because she was hiding at all, but this was a decent sized building for a small town. Five stories, and she could have been hiding anywhere. When he finally got to the lobby he scowled to see her sitting against the far wall.

"Very practical" he snapped, and she looked up with that damnable frown. "Sitting in front of the doors waiting for the spawn to smell you and beat them down. Maker's sake, bring your damn stuff back upstairs. If you have to stay here, there's no point to us- well- no point to...” He took a deep breath and steeled himself. “There’s no point to us sparring like this." 

Worst apology _ever_.

And yet she relaxed at his words, gaze tracking to the ceiling as if in contemplation. She looked almost meditative for a moment - almost impossible to imagine on Princess's face - and then looked back to him with something a lot like serenity. Her stupidly calm acceptance made him bristle, uncomfortable and uncertain. He’d been expecting her to push back, shove for shove, but that calmness threw him off.

There was something eerie about a woman who could accept being betrayed and abandoned and trapped with the undead with nary a word of protest. If anything, she’d argued with him upstairs for her right to _stay_. 

She pushed herself up while he was caught in his suspicions, hauling her kit with her. But before she took a single step, she looked him over. _Looking at the monster, Princess?_ He tried to ignore the lack of horror in her eyes. Horror would make a lot more sense than the look of- hope? Fascination?

Sick curiosity?

"Right," she said at last, then cleared her throat. She paused, as if considering her words with care. "... You know, I didn't come here because I thought I might die. I came here because I wanted to. Because I wanted to help. That hasn't changed."

_I came here because I wanted to._

His world stuttered to a halt at that sentence. Seven little words, all fairly insignificant on their own, and really the sentence as it was structured wasn't that noteworthy, and really she probably didn't mean it the way that he had immediately interpreted it but...

He wasn't too proud to admit to himself that he was lonely. He couldn't really lie to himself and say that he wasn't some horrific beast just because he didn't look in the mirror every day. He knew what he was, he knew what he looked like, and he knew what she had to think of him. After all, he'd yelled at her, propositioned her, insulted her, knocked her out with anaesthetic gas, locked her in a basement, stolen her bike, called her demeaning names, everything he could possibly think of to protect himself and keep her at arm's length. For her sake, to avoid contamination, and for his sake, to get his research done.

And because he wouldn't be able to stand it if he saw a flicker of disgust or fear in her eyes if she thought he wasn't looking.

But she was _here_ , and she was being so _stubborn_ and refusing to leave, and then those words, those magnificently painful words which _he had to be misinterpreting..._ it was just his lonely, fucked up brain playing tricks on him. He’d been an unpleasant ass when he’d been _normal_ , and now... no one wanted to spend time with the undead. Especially not if the undead in question had a tendency for dickishness. 

"I..." He swallowed a couple of times, working past the sudden lump in his throat. "You can't...” He steeled himself yet again. “Look, Princess, what I'm doing may not be safe for you. The best intentions in the world won't save you from a virus. Especially not this virus. And I... I work alone because I don't think I could stand it if someone else got sick because of me. It's not personal."

She snorted mirthlessly. "And you don't think I know that? That being in a lab puts me at risk? But you said it yourself, I'd have to be taking the air from your lungs, swapping body fluids. Which I don't intend to do." She came closer. "Look. You couldn't stand it if somebody else got sick because of you. People _have_ gotten sick and died because of _me_.”

The irony. If only she knew the truth. But that wasn’t an option.

“Trust me,” she continued, “I know what it feels like. Besides... you heard my general worth to the people around me. They left me behind so easily, and I'm honestly not surprised, except that it took them this long. So..." Cauthrien spread her hands. "You give me procedures to follow to keep myself safe, I'll follow them. You need... I don't know. Tactical planning or heavy lifting, you can ask. I just need to have something to do with this."

Maker, this was going to be a nightmare. Just what he had never wanted, his own little lab bunny; well, that was a lie, he wouldn’t have said no to one before all this had started. Back when he’d been less horrified of himself.

"Okay Princess,” he sighed, succumbing to the inevitable, “if you're going to stay here, we have to clear something up. This isn't really like the flu, it's not an airborne virus. It needs a living host to survive, so yes, you're not gonna get it just by breathing the air in the lab. It needs to be transferred by fluids, which is why the spawn try to cut you, bite you, so on. But if I ever tell you to get out, if I tell you to run and not stop, you do _precisely_ what I say, we clear? No questions, no arguing, you get out and go. With my work, things can change- far too quickly. If you want to help me at all, and try to understand what I'm saying is not intended as an insult, you need to understand that.

"So yeah, don't go around thinking you're swallowing big lungfuls of plague air, that’s a great start. Even coughing would have to be fairly direct, right in the face. Simple procedures when I'm working with an active sample will be enough. So you're safe with me until I tell you otherwise. Then you need to run."

It was a little thing, but misinformation like that turned fear into panic, and turned streets into riot fields. He'd seen the news, before he'd lost himself to this, and he'd seen how it had begun to consume the country. People in Kocari County and up in Haven proclaiming it was divine punishment. The government not giving anywhere near enough details. The borders locking down. It angered him, because there were plenty of medical professionals who should have been able to make a statement, something- _anything_ \- to calm the population. And no one had.

And then it'd been too late for him.

"Second thing..." Second thing, when she gotten so close to him? He took a step backwards, restless energy his excuse. He felt... unpleasant, like his skin was too tight, his veins too small. His head was pounding, a fierce ache that was growing by the minute. "About your friends leaving you. That was pretty shitty of them, and it's not cool in my books. I mean, I don't really know you, but even if you lack camaraderie, even if you are a bloody murderer, there are standards of loyalty and fidelity that are more important than anything else. But your attitude about the whole thing?" He gestured vaguely at her, as if that conveyed his point. When she started to frown, he surged onwards. “I’m not here for the purpose of assisted suicide, sweetheart, so if you’ve just up and given up because I’m convenient, I’m not interested. If you’re here to work? Fine, I can swallow my pride and work around that. If you’re here out of some ill placed belief that you have a penance to pay and hurling yourself at death is the best way to go about it? Find another patsy.”

And there it was. She was here, whether she wanted to be or not, whether he wanted her there or not. It was inevitable. "Well, after having said all that, I..." He sighed. She’d let him say his part with hardly an interruption, and that was almost... odd. After months with only his own voice for company, there was a part of him that wouldn’t have minded her interjection. "I don't really know what I can get you to do." Actually, he had _some_ ideas, but he wasn't about to blurt out ' _care to lend me some blood?_ ' on their first day together. "I guess we can get you settled in? Find you somewhere to bunk down at night or something. Come on." 

Cauthrien nodded to it all, though as she followed him back towards the stairs, she said, "I did earn it. What they did."

It was soft. Barely audible. But it made him flinch all the same. "Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree, because no one _earns_ that kind of shit." If he had a psych, the words _abandonment issues_ would probably feature prominently in future sessions. Thankfully, darkspawn didn’t feature on any health insurance plans that he’d ever seen. 

She followed closer than he would have liked, just to the side, one step behind. Every so often she drew even with him on the stairs, eyes sliding towards him as if she were taking his measure. She was, he noticed once again, maybe an inch taller than him, and he wasn't short by any standard of measurement. Except maybe giraffe; he shook his head, scowling at his completely unhelpful inner comedian. 

There was a sort of lethal grace in her movements, everything precise and planned, each action careful and poised as if she were able to lash out at any given second. He wondered if she ever let that guard drop, that need to be so defensive. Clearly she wasn't expecting to attack _him_ , so... why the lethal energy that buzzed around her?

That energy pricked him into unhelpful comedy once more. "Unless there’s some darker reason for the brooding- do you eat babies, or something?" He led her back onto the floor of his lab and tried for a grin, but it came off rather weakly. She didn’t smile in return. "Come on, Princess, you've piqued my interest now. Cards on the table- what's your grief? Why the ' _nobody loves poor little me_ ' act? Something I should know about before I just let you into my lab and my life?"

Cauthrien exhaled shakily, falling back a little the closer they drew to the lab. "I suppose so. I'm a traitor to the country and I was at Ostagar when this all started. I was in a position where I might have been able to stop it. I didn't. And so I want to help stop it now, if I can.” 

Her shoulders straightened. “And you?” she said bluntly. “Why so determined to save everybody without hurting everybody?"

"It didn't _start_ at Ostagar, Princess."

The words were out of his mouth before he could help himself, loaded with all the resentment and self loathing and anger that had built inside of him these last few months. And he shouldn't have said it, shouldn't have damn well admitted it outright, but she was clearly carrying some kind of guilt around with her, something she really didn't need to.

"And traitor's an ambiguous term at the best of times." He slowed to a stop in the hallway, the numerous offices mostly closed off. He didn't know why he wanted to try and assuage her fears. Maybe there was something selfish in there- he was responsible for the virus, not her, so whatever crime she thought she'd committed was negligible in comparison to the monster he'd unleashed on the world. "One man's trash is another man's treasure. One man's traitor is another man's hero. Traitor is vague. Monster isn't."

He took a deep breath, trying not to feel how his insides churned unhappily. His head pounded. His body felt weary, drained, desperate. He ached _everywhere_. "And I'm most definitely a monster. Every possible meaning of the term, happily made real for your discomfort."

Cauthrien huffed a laugh. "Hardly. A monster is... those things out there are monsters. I've had to kill enough of them. I know. A monster doesn't _speak_." She shook her head, slowly, almost in disbelief. "Even if it didn't start at Ostagar, it could have _been_ stopped. We-"

Her voice caught.

"... I was involved in why the government denied that anything at all was happening. We could have quarantined the town. We didn't."

_And I'm the reason the need for a quarantine ever came up in the first place._

He didn't say it aloud, though. He wasn't stupid enough to just blurt out to a woman who had apparently worked for the government that he’d been one of the original researchers, that the virus was man-made and had probably been shaped at his hands. Well, she had been at Soldier's Peak that day, the day of the Presidential tour, but he'd assumed she was either just a lackey, or a hired gun. Secret Service maybe. But by her words she seemed to be someone relatively important. Which made him wonder if she'd put two and two together yet, if she'd realised his connection to the virus...

Surely not. Surely she wouldn't be this carefully friendly with him if she suspected him of having anything to do with the origin of the plague.

"Yeah, well," and he tried to pretend his voice wasn't shaking, and he tried to promise himself that she wouldn't notice. He had no guarantee of either, "by the sounds of it, everyone else has already made you suffer enough. There's no reason for you to beat yourself up, too."

Sound advice. Shame he had no intention of following it himself. Besides, he could rationalize that there wasn't really anyone beating him up, because nobody seemed to have realised yet that it was a man-made virus. So he needed to do a lot of guilt to make up for the fact that no one else was blaming him. His hand was shaking when he pushed open the door to one of the empty offices. "I sleep in the one next door, but I figured you'd want your space. I mean, if you'd prefer the company, I could make room, but I don't know if it's a good... just, uh, you know what, let's start again. Here's your room. Make yourself comfy."

She watched him with a climbing brow as he stumbled over himself.

And then she shook her head, stepping by him and putting down her case. For a moment the scent of gunpowder and sweat and woman was overwhelming. He fought the urge to just stop and breathe it in, because he knew how badly that would be interpreted. But the smell sank into him, and she was just so very _alive_...

The smell of life, so very absent from his existence these last few months, was vibrant, intoxicating. His headache surged and his bones shrieked; his breath caught at the pain, and he nearly sagged against the wall. With a great deal of effort he kept himself upright.

"If we're going to start over," she said, clearly unaware of his immediate discomfort, "can I reiterate that you should drop the _Princess?_ "

It was asked much more nicely this time, and she turned back to him with an attempt at a smile.

She was striking, even with a half-smile, and something in his chest tightened painfully. He tried to ignore it, to pretend that it was only the strain of the last few hours taking its toll... he tried to tell himself that it was only because she was the only woman he'd seen in six months, really the only human contact he'd had since this disaster had begun. But a niggling voice reminded him that he'd noticed her at the lab as well, when his bruised ego had talked him into winking at a pretty girl. 

And another voice whispered that she was the only viable host he’d come into any extended contact with as well. 

Oh Maker. He couldn't... this was a disaster. He couldn't let himself get attached to her in any way shape or form. And he felt genuinely ill now, his skin tight, his body flush with heat and aching as if he were in the midst of a bad bout of the flu. 

"Uh, no Princess?" He rubbed the back of his neck, hoping she wouldn't notice how flustered he was. "Sure, whatever. Look, I'll let you settle in. I'm going back to work."

And then he closed the door and left her there. Because that was easier than seeing her smile.

___

She watched him go, then sighed and wilted. What to do? What to _think?_ There were plans to be made, contingencies to examine... she had to think of how to convince him to go to Denerim, how to do _anything_ for her except put up with her. There were the hints of attraction, but she was used to that sort of mockery from years in the army, attempts to unbalance her, unman her. And he certainly did use it to make her retreat. The last time somebody had flirted with her in earnest-

It didn't matter.

She had time now, time that should be put to use for better things than memories. She stretched and looked around the office. There was a couch shoved against the far wall, dusty but otherwise in decent state, though it looked too short for her to stretch out fully. Still, better than sleeping on that roof. She dropped down onto it and worked off her mask and glasses, then her belt. Setting it all aside, she went so far as to remove her kevlar and unzip her high-necked jacket beneath. It _was_ summer and while there was power in the building, the office itself didn't seem to be cooled. A long day under the sun- yes, a little bit of not-so-close air was nice.

Down to her tank top, she leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling tiles. Institutional. Almost comforting. Not stone and not sky - very human, and very normal. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend...

She must have napped; when she woke up the sun was lower through the window, the light more golden than bright. Her stomach ached and she pushed herself from the couch, fishing out one of her ration bars and biting into it. Less than appetizing, but acceptable. The problem lay in that she only had enough for maybe two more days.

She frowned, and continued eating as she opened her rifle case to check over how she had taken everything down.

Did Justice have food here? Did he even _need_ it? Anything living needed food, she supposed, and if he could run and move like that, his muscles must crave calories as much as hers did. Fingers stroking over the metal of the rifle barrel, and then the felt of the case cradling it, she pursed her lips. It might be an imposition to ask, but better to get it out of the way.

She shut the case and straightened up, heading for the door.

She doubled back only to grab up her mask, leaving the rest of her gear and heading out into the hallway, threading her way back to where Justice's lab was.


	5. Chapter Four

_Dragon's Peak, 24 Solace, 9:31 Dragon_

He had to admit that this wasn’t one of his better days.

The numbers on the screen of his laptop didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and staring at them numbly didn’t help. Admittedly, if he actually tried concentrating, it probably wouldn’t be that difficult, but therein lay the rub. Concentrating while there was a living person within a few rooms of him, a living person that didn't seem to flinch when he walked by, a living person who didn't seem to find him disgusting - not immediately, anyway- was all but impossible. There was a living person just a few dozen feet away, and at this rate she was going to drive him insane. 

He was not used to this... _proximity_. At least with the handful of scavengers that had set up a settlement here, he’d never had to worry about them being too close. They kept their distance, even when they were organising trades, and that had suited him just fine. He didn’t need to see the horror on their faces, or see the disgust turn to blind anger and hatred. He’d seen the old monster movies, he knew how it went down- the humble, shambling monsters pursued by the rabid crowd of townsfolk. A stormy backdrop, the chase concluding on a rooftop, or a cliff...

… the selfless maiden who stood defiantly between the hunters and the hunted, proud and angry and prepared for violence...

He scowled and stabbed at the keyboard mercilessly. He didn’t give a rat’s ass what she thought about him- _liar_ , whispered a voice in his head- and he was almost completely certain she would not be jumping in front of a wild crowd to save him any time soon. It had been hours since he'd seen her last, hours he had spent buried in work with a saline drip going in an attempt to feel more stable, hoping against hope that he could force himself to concentrate. It wasn't working.

He ran a hand over his face with a groan of frustration. He couldn't let her stay if she was going to distract him like this. Not that it was strictly her fault - after all, he had no intention or business obsessing over her, not when it wasn't one hundred percent safe to be in a room with him. It was just that damn smile of hers, or almost smile, or not frown. Whatever it was. She had no business smiling at him, no reason to treat him like... well, like a human being. It had him thinking things he had no rational reason to be thinking, caught in an endless line of _maybes_ , wondering what he might be able to do with her that wouldn't compromise her health.

“ _Idiot_ ,” he snarled under his breath, his stomach roiling in disgust at himself. As if she’d have anything to do with him. He hit the keys so hard that the screen froze again. “For _fuck’s_ sake-”

The sound of footsteps came from the hall and he started violently, only just controlling himself enough to stay seated. Guess he wasn’t quite used to having company yet; it wasn’t like she needed to know how much she unbalanced him though. The footsteps stilled by where he guessed the lab door was. He squared his shoulders. She knocked. Taking a deep breath, he glanced over his shoulder to call a hello- and froze.

There she was, in the doorway ( _his doorway_ ), without her mask or her goggles or her tactical jacket, just six feet of _woman_ in a tank top and pants and boots. 

Where Aura had been all generous curves and soft skin, pouting lips and demure, suggestive eyes, Cauthrien was lean, hard-edged, every line on her body carefully carved for efficiency rather than outright seduction. That didn't stop the sight of her from doing all kinds of things to him, from the length of her legs to the slight curve of her waist to the perfect sculpture of her shoulders. Stupid woman, didn’t she _understand_ how dangerous he was to be around? Was that her heart he could hear racing, or was it his own? So much exposed skin, so inviting, so easy...

Oh Maker, and then there was the flat of her belly, her shirt stretching so temptingly across it, as if just begging him to slide his hand up under it and over the taut muscles beneath. Would she gasp, smile, scowl, encourage him, slap him away? Would he be stronger than her? If he surprised her, would she fight, or would it all be over in seconds, would she-

 _Maker_. Where the fuck had all that come from? Shaking from the sudden onslaught of lust and violence, it occurred to him that he was staring, so he looked away quickly, back down to his work and called, "Afternoon."

_Maker, don’t let her notice that tremble._

"Afternoon," she returned, sounding uncertain and awkward. Oh Maker, she _had_ noticed. Was it possible that he'd actually unnerved her? His thoughts felt feverish. Maybe if he went to her, he could reassure her. Touch her. See what it felt like to be alive again. She cleared her throat, distracting him. "Do you- what's the food situation here? I have rations enough to last me a few days, but..." 

He very pointedly stared down at the laptop in front of him. At his hands. If he kept his hands where he could see them, he wouldn’t think so much about touching her bare arms. He could hear her moving around, but even though it unnerved him not knowing where she was ( _what if she turned nasty? He had no way to defend himself if she crept up behind him with a shiv-_ ), it would have been infinitely worse to look back and actually see her again. See her in that tight white knit, her bare skin, her hair curling softly against her neck and-

 _For fuck's sake, just stop it_. Where were these thoughts even coming from? What did he think was going to happen, even if he did admit to finding her attractive? He hadn't been able to keep a woman interested back even when he'd been hale and hearty and at least passably attractive. Now he looked like a corpse, he was still contagious according to his research, and- Hey! He wasn't exactly a people person at the best of times. Being a member of the infected walking dead tended to make him even crankier, she'd already yelled at him multiple times in the space of the afternoon, he'd yelled back, and-

And it might just be the virus whispering dirty little intentions into his lizard brain, trying to crawl out of him and into her perfect, wreckable body.

The thought hurt, but it sobered him a little.

"I have a little," he called over his shoulder; he tried not to sound stiff. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the far wall. "There's a fridge over there, red magnets on the door, it has food in it. Don't open the one with the green magnets, it has viral cultures. Normally, I make a few trades with the locals, a little food for some of my chemical mixes, but I suppose I'll have to offer them something a little better if I'm in need of enough to put some meat back on your bones." 

She snorted, footsteps retreating; he breathed easier for a moment.. "Was that supposed to be a joke?” she said. “You're a lot skinnier than I am." There was a pause as she opened the fridge and rummaged around for a moment. There was distance there, physical and emotional. He almost began to relax and block her out.

And then she ruined it by asking, "Is there any chance of showers?"

He stiffened. Any sobering effect of realizing he was a ravening beast evaporated. His brain screeched to a halt, and distantly he heard the snap of pencil lead against paper.

_Her body might have been hidden from view by steam-fogged glass, but the outline was on display for his desperate gaze all the same. And what he couldn't see with his eyes, he could easily fill in with his imagination. Her hair, slick and wet, clinging to her neck and her shoulders, dark whorls against pale skin, shapes that he wanted to trace with his tongue. Water sluicing down her body in rivulets and rivers, highlighting the definition of muscles just as temptingly as it did her curves. Her eyes would be half-lidded from the simple pleasure of the hot water, beating at sore muscles, soothing away her aches and pains, her lips parted just barely, a drop or two of water clinging to the upper one as a challenge, a temptation for him to kiss or lick or bite away. He didn't have soap, only the liquid stuff they kept in the bathrooms for the hand dispensers, and he could imagine her scooping it up in her hand, running it lazily over herself, her body slick with suds and relaxed from the heat, and when she turned around to face him-_

He threw his pencil to the desk before he snapped the wood of it in frustration and ran shaking hands over his face, trying to get himself under control. _Maker_ , he could actually feel his pulse throbbing painfully, and the needle in his arm for the saline was actually hurting for once, as if his nerve endings were sluggishly waking up. He felt like he wasn't getting enough oxygen to his brain - and that made no sense, given that in the last few months he'd caught himself hardly breathing at all.

"There's an emergency chemical shower in every lab," he said, more a rasp than actual words. Hopefully she'd just assume he was angry at her for interrupting him, and not that his voice was hoarse for other reasons. "That's the best you're going to get. It's not the Hyatt here, after all." 

"It's fine," she said, shutting the fridge door. "I-"

She stopped. He waited, wrestling himself back under control. If she would just _leave..._

"Are you okay?" She cleared her throat. and clarified, a moment later, "The IV?"

He jerked, pulling on the line, when he realised she'd crept a little closer. He winced and nudged at the cannula, trying to get it to sit properly in the vein. "It's nothing special," he muttered, using a long-dry alcohol towelette to wipe away the dark brown droplet of his fouled blood that escaped and sat against his grey skin. He took the little wad of paper with its smear of filth and stuffed it into the contamination bin near his feet; it was so dry it crackled in his hand. "It's just a normal saline solution, same as you'd see in any hospital. I've tweaked my own little additive-" He gestured to the empty syringe on the bench top, "- which is glucose based, for the energy, but it has a couple of other nutrients as well. Whatever I could find still in code, really. I eat a little, but for the most part my body has trouble breaking the food down." He grimaced, then let out a small, mirthless laugh. "You know what, you're not interested in that. Sorry."

He rubbed a hand over his mouth, fidgeting. She was too close; he swore he could just about feel the heat of her, and that smell of leather and gunpowder and perspiration could only be her. Funny, his sense of smell had not been amazing these last few months. Then again, he’d not spent a lot of time around living creatures to test the theory. He tried to take a steadying breath, and instead got another lungful of leather and woman. Surely she'd hear the thumping of his pulse if she came any closer; the damn thing was echoing in his ears, louder than it had been in months. "But, uh, yeah, I'm fine. I do what I need to survive."

 _What I really want is to do you, though._ He closed his eyes and weathered the lecherous thought.

And then, of course, she broke his concentration. "Actually," she said, "I am interested. You said you're carrying the virus, right? And you- look like the ones that are further gone, but you can talk and think, so you're obviously not one." She came around so she could look at his face. "Can I sit somewhere?"

He took a deep breath through his nose just as he opened his eyes again and let his gaze flick up to her once. He could see the muscle definition in her arms, her sleek, toned figure, the way her tank top sat lower than he'd realised and it was just enough (or _she_ was just enough) for a hint of cleavage across the top.

Deliberately, he looked away and stared at his laptop. "Uh, sure, pull up a stool," he said, gesturing vaguely towards the long line of them against the bench. He heard the sound of one being scraped across the ground and assumed she'd complied. "I am..."

What was safe to admit to?

"I am infected, yes," he said slowly, trying to gather his thoughts. After six months, it still didn't make a lot of sense to him, and it would take all his concentration to produce something halfway intelligible for her to understand. "Most definitely infected. I fell sick back in the beginning, when the outbreaks were just rumours, when nobody knew just how bad this was going to get. I was..." Did the outside world realize it was a man made virus yet? There, that was the cold water fear that he needed to get his thoughts back on track. He straightened somewhat. "I was working at Soldier's Peak General, in the research department, when I got sick. So I went home, and tried to ride it out, thinking it was like any other bug, and... it wasn't. I don't, um, really remember a lot about those few days, but I was locked in my apartment, so I couldn't get out to infect anyone else, and I didn't have anyone who might come to check on me, so there was no one for me to attack and pass on the virus."

His stomach churned thinking about those few days, alone in the dark, with nothing but the boiling of his blood and the screaming in his head. "I have some theories about the nature of the virus, and potentially that it needs to be passed on in order to survive. Since I didn't pass it on, I think it burnt itself out. The smears I've got of my blood show the virus to be much more sluggish than in active darkspawn, so it's possible that by locking myself away, I sort of... I don't know, neutered the damn thing. So I'm contagious, but it's not in control of me anymore."

_Mostly._

She was quiet and he risked glancing at her again, expecting to see horror and disgust in her eyes. _And there it was_. Her jaw was tight and her expression shuttered, eyes averted. "So yeah," he said, trying to smile and failing, "that's me. I've spent the last few months since trying to undo what this virus has done, or find a vaccine, and just... work out why I'm not dead. Because by rights I should be." 

He waited for the stammering excuse, the backing away. Maybe Princess was just the sort who needed to know the facts before the horror set in. But all she said, at last, was, "Soldiers Peak?" It was barely more than a croak as she bowed her head and buried her face in her hands. 

It felt like a physical blow. Did she know?

Did she remember?

His failed smile turned into a frown. "Yeah, I worked at Soldier's. With Avernus Jons? The famous physician? It was... well, it was a fairly great job until all of this happened. It was great for my career - not so great for my marriage, though - and I was learning more from that man in a single day than I learned for months at a time while in university. It's just unfortunate the way everything turned out. I don't even know if he's alive or dead, but I know lots of the other techs were getting sick around the same time as me."

"Nobody ever found him." She sounded distant. And then she frowned, just a little. "... Have I seen you before, then?" she asked.

Panic flooded through him. _She remembers_ \- or had they checked the staff files? Wait, she didn’t know his real name. What had they been doing, poking around up at Soldier's in the first place? Oh Maker, did they already know it was a man made virus, and she was just playing him for a chump? Was this all just a trap, a way to bring him in for trial? Was she here to trip him up, trick him into confessing?

And then he felt her eyes on him, and glancing over he could see the recognition dawning in her eyes, and that was- _no_ , that was the _worst_ thing that could happen. He had to cut this off, and fast.

"Um, I don't think so, sweetheart," he rasped. "I'm sure I'd remember a pretty girl like you, after all." His traitor reflexes made him wink as he said it.

Slowly, she pushed herself off of her stool and came a few steps closer. "... Are you sure? I was stationed on the president's tour. Just before Ostagar." She leaned in, no doubt trying to look beyond the discoloration of his skin, the way it was creased and pulled tight, the hollowness of his cheeks and eyes.

“You should stay back,” he said, trying for authoritative and failing. With the IV still running into his arm, he couldn’t exactly get up and walk around to the other side of the lab to get away from her.

She ignored him. "You're completely sure you didn't wink at me while Dr. Jons was showing off the main lab?"

_Oh Maker._

He hadn't had a woman this close since... well, since Aura. He leaned back as she leaned in, desperate to find his footing again; he held his breath as she came even closer.

_Kissing distance._

"Maybe, not completely sure," he rasped, eyes flicking unintentionally to her mouth. "Princess, you... you really should stay back. I don't have the kind of cooties you want to catch."

"I-"

He waited for the accusation- but it never came. Instead she stopped herself, straightened up. Stepped back. She looked away and took a deep breath.

"Well. Interesting," she said at last. "Good to know, I guess." She was flushed and tense, her lips twitching between a grimace and an uneasy smile. "I... I'll go- take that shower. Or something. And then maybe we can talk about- what I'm going to do with myself."

He looked away and nodded, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. She already thought he was disgusting, no need to encourage such thoughts by making her think he was some kind of pervert.

But Maker, she was glorious; so very alive, warm and active and willing to have a conversation with him. He didn't know if it was the male part of him that found her so fascinating, or whether it was the virus still lurking in his flesh stirring sluggishly at the presence of another. Neither option was particularly good for her.

Maybe he was just a sad and lonely asshole who was so desperate for company that he’d take anything. Even someone who hated him.

He pushed up from the bench. "Great," he said flatly. "I'll head for my quarters and leave you to it, then. Last thing either of us wants is for me to be around you while you're vulnerable like that and easier to infect." The words were out of his mouth before he could think them through, and he winced. "Plus, you know, privacy and all that jazz."

He unhooked the saline from the stand, making sure to carry it at a height. "See you in a few, Princess."

And then he was out the door and cursing himself for a fool.

He locked himself in his room, the monster retreating to his lair. It was a pointless gesture; she wouldn't follow him. No, if he thought about it, it was insulting to even think of it- she was a sensible, grown woman, and not the type to just offer herself up to a stranger.

And definitely not a mostly dead stranger.

That didn't stop the blood from pounding in his veins, painfully so, and lurid fantasies playing out behind his eyelids.

\---

She didn't remain in Justice's lab. There was something too intimate about it, beyond questions of privacy. It was _his_ lab. To change it into a bathing station seemed wrong.

And besides - she didn't want to ruin his work.

The equipment and furniture in the next lab over were dusty and untouched, and it, too, seemed a strange place to bathe. The climate control didn't extend to the room, and outside of Justice's little oasis it was as hot and humid as she remembered. But she closed the glass door, as little protection as that was, and stripped down. She undid her hair and tried not to feel too exposed. _Years of barracks life_ , she reminded herself. _One infuriating half-dead man_ , whom exhaustion and familiarity had rendered not so infuriating. She stepped beneath the shower and pulled the handle- and promptly jumped out of the path of the water, swearing.

It was freezing cold. No water heater, she told herself, and forced herself back under. There wasn't one in the damn Vigil, either, but they'd taken to heating wash water over fires recently. Two weeks of pampering had made her soft again. She grit her teeth and let the water rush over her, and when she was soaked, she stepped aside and looked for soap.

What she found was astringent stuff, and so she was gentle with it, diluting it thoroughly. She tried not to think as she worked. There was too much to think of - Ostagar, Soldier's Peak, Justice, the Vigil. Garavel. Justice. _Denerim_.

Maker. She _did_ need to think about Denerim.

And she had to find out more about Justice. Was he right, that a person could live through infection as long as they were restrained? What could somebody like him manage? He barely ate food now, and sedative gas had done nothing to him. The guys in Denerim were better equipped for this than she was, but how did that help? His movies would have had her bash him over the head, and a brain-damaged or dead Justice was not going to help anybody. There had to be something else. She just had to get close, and learn, and listen, and... if she could just convince him to go with her, it would feel so much better.

 _Feel_ so much better?

She grimaced. There was no room for feeling one way or the other. This was necessity. He was being recalcitrant - obstructive. Paranoid. And she knew paranoia, and what it could seed, what it could destroy. She stifled a groan and curled her fingers around the pull again, letting the frigid water wash over her again.

Hair and skin rinsed, she considered a moment and then dragged her socks and pants over beneath the shower, along with her bra. She washed them, crouched and cursing her aching, chilled fingers. Her jacket should be washed too, she thought. And there should be a hazmat suit or something similar nearby, to cover herself until it was all dry.

But the cabinet where it should have been was empty. The fire blanket was still in its quick release canister, but one touch and she knew she wouldn't be able to stand the harsh wool. She would have to hope the dry air in the lab proper, where the climate control was still active, would leave her with wearable clothes soon enough. Wringing out her hair and dragging on her panties and tank top, she decided it would have to do.

A quick trip back to her room and a soak for her jacket, and she moved everything to Justice's lab, stretching it out in an out of the way corner and trying not to feel too exposed. Scars traced over her legs from various accidents and injuries, and the air conditioning was too chilly. She crossed her arms over her chest and looked towards the hall. Her room would just leave her sweat-soaked again, and she didn't relish the idea of hiding.

No, she'd stay here.

She ended up taking a seat with a bit of food from the red-tagged fridge, eating and thinking of Denerim. It had been months since she'd seen the city. Teagan Guerrin was in charge now. The military, such as it was, was not how she had left it. They wouldn't trust her - they had barely trusted her then, favoritism too obvious as it lifted her above her station. But it was her only option. They couldn't remain here.

And if she helped restore her country's sanity-

There were no footsteps to warn her. There was only Justice's voice, ringing out across the room:

"So hopefully that was to your satis-"

She jerked around to face him, flushing first out of surprise and then at the way that his gaze was trailing downwards. She could hear the faint squeal of his fingers gripping too-tight to the doorframe. His gaze was all over her, and she crossed her legs instinctively.

"I- yes," she coughed. "Cold, but- I was going to change into a hazmat suit. There aren't any left."

She rolled her seat over to the nearest table, tucking her legs beneath it and resting a hand lightly on the edge of the table. "The rest of my clothing's drying, over there. Ah- I was thinking we could talk again? Now that I've had something to eat, too?"

"If we're going to talk," he rasped, "you have to... hide. Or dress. Or... _something_ , fuck. Princess, I... I know I don't really look much like one any more, but I'm still human, and I still... _I can't_."

"I thought we agreed on no _Princess_ ," she mumbled, heat building in her cheeks. Maker. She hadn't- this wasn't something she was used to handling. She swallowed, thickly, and scooted her legs a little more under the table. "And my pants are soaked right now. It would probably just make things worse. Is this- okay?"

Thirty-five and hiding half-under a desk because a scientist who looked like death walking couldn't stand seeing her - because she turned him _on?_

" _You_ agreed on no Princess," he managed. "I don't think I agreed to anything."

Irritation cut through her embarrassment, giving her enough room to breathe. "Yes, you did," she said. "And for the second time you've gone back on it. I'd appreciate if you showed me a _little_ respect. Either in words or by not ogling me."

Either he hated her or he liked her. That was how it worked, wasn't it?

"Oh, I'm _sorry_ ,” he snarled, his abrupt anger surprising her. “I didn't know that finding a half naked woman attractive was a sign of disrespect. I didn't know that being attracted to someone was some sort of grave insult. My apologies, _Cauthrien_ , I'll keep your precious feelings in mind next time you prance around _my home_ half dressed. Whatever was I thinking?" He looked like he wanted to say more, his eyes seething, but he cursed softly and looked to the side.

She scowled, fingers curling to a loose fist on the desk. But she didn't say anything. Instead she looked away, closing her eyes and trying to relax.

She couldn't alienate him. She couldn't. It didn't matter if he thought she was trying to use whatever wiles she had to confuse him. It didn't matter that he found her attractive, or that he was staring, or that she had never and wasn't about to start using sex to get what she needed. They had to come to some sort of understanding.

"... I'm sorry," she said.

He sighed, and she heard what sounded like him rubbing a hand over his face. "Maker, don't... look let's start again. You wanted to talk? Stay under that table and we can talk. Just no more unintentional peep shows, thanks."

She grimaced and bit back every argument she could make, settling only with a firm, "I didn't intend it to be a peep show." _And I didn't intend for you to find me attractive, and this is all becoming a mess_. Cauthrien rubbed at the spot between her brows as she lifted her head again. "How many times does this make that we've started over?"

"By my count at least five. But I haven't really been keeping count." He laughed shakily, staring at the ceiling tiles. "What do you possibly need to talk about now? I've shown you the food and I've given you somewhere safe to bunk down and get clean. Unless you've come up with some grand scheme to get you out of my head-"

She made a sound of protest.

" _Hair_ ," he corrected quickly with a momentary scowl, "in which case I'm all ears, because this place probably isn't safe for you, Princess. And you look like the type who doesn't cope well with inaction, so I'm betting you'll be bored out of your pretty little skull in five minutes."

"You don't have hair," she said, and her lips curled just a little, just the tiniest bit, traitors to her awkwardness and tension and embarrassment. She leaned an elbow on the table and looked at him - really looked. And she listened.

Somehow, she couldn't believe that he really wanted her gone. No. It seemed far more likely that he _thought_ she should be gone. Maybe she could use that. Maybe...

"In Denerim," she said, slowly, "you wouldn't have to bargain for food, and I'd have things to keep me occupied. More than one pair of pants, too." Cauthrien shifted on her stool. "I know you don't trust anybody, but I do want you to consider it."

His eyes slid closed, tension knitting his brow again.

"Denerim is not an option for me," he said softly, carefully, words chosen with cautious deliberation. "Denerim isn't... safe. I can't let my research fall into the wrong hands. I can't let my research be stopped either, and once I get to someone like Denerim there is every chance that will happen. I can't be..."

For a moment he stopped, hands curling into fists at his sides. When he could talk again, his voice was ragged.

"I have to fix this. _I have to_. And nothing, not the government, not the media, not outdated ethical considerations or ridiculously irrelevant religious concepts, is going to stop me. Do you hear me? _Nothing!_ " 

She looked away, down at her hands, leashing the almost competitive anger his words created. _You don't understand_ , she thought. _This isn't only about you_.

"I need to be involved," she said, finally. "Just the same as you _needing_ to fix this. I need to help. But you're right, I can't help from here except drain your resources and- bother you. So tell me how to reconcile that." She stood, crossing the room to him until she was close enough to make out the details of his eyes.

"Tell me what you need for your research. I'll help as much as I can."

She watched him expectantly, and he dragged his gaze up to her face. It wasn't just need patterning his expression, like she'd expected. No, there was something else.

There was fear.

She took a step back. She didn't need him scared right now, no matter the reason.

"Blood," he said, voice thick and hoarse, "I need blood. Darkspawn, I mean. The virus keeps mutating, or there might be several strains of it. Every time I think I've pinned it down, something else changes in the structure." He swallowed awkwardly. "I have to lure a spawn away every few days to get samples. And there's not a lot of people who would find that pleasant."

"I can do that," she said, without hesitation.

It was impossible not to notice how hitched his breathing was, even if his breathing was unbelievably shallow. She could almost imagine him blushing beneath his greyed skin. She couldn't remember ever having this effect - except maybe on her high school boyfriend, not quite sure what to do with a tall, awkward girl with a too-big chest and-

She was getting distracted.

Cauthrien squared her shoulders. "I'll get you those samples. I- do they need to be taken live?" That would be the only problem. But maybe, if she did this for him, he'd _trust_ her.

Of course, for now he immediately turned his back on her, bracing himself in the doorway.

"Samples," he said hoarsely, "um, yes. I mean, yes, live. Or as close to as possible. Once the host becomes deceased, you have a window of about six minutes before the virus goes as well. I can prolong that in a lab, for tests, but uh... can't just be a dead one off the street."

As she watched him, the disbelief and uncertainty faded. He wasn't so dead as he appeared. She pictured again how he had winked at her back at Soldier's Peak. He still had the same squarish sort of face, the same wide jaw and a flattish nose, and though the dark hair was gone-

She clamped down on the thought.

"I can..." His voice was shaking, and he swallowed and tried again. "I can give you things to help. The chemical bombs, and such."

She swallowed and ran a hand back through her damp hair. She'd come this far. Just clarify this, and she could retreat, or he could retreat, and then maybe she could stop thinking about that wink.

She tugged at the hem of her shirt and clenched her teeth until she felt in control again. Nominally.

"The chemical bombs," she repeated back to him. "Like the one you threw down into the alley? What do they do, exactly? Walk me through it, and I'll get you samples as soon as tomorrow morning."

He sucked in a breath and addressed the hallway, rather than turning back to her. "It's a concoction of mine, one of my early attempts at a vaccine. It has a really good success rate at incapacitating the host, and by extension the virus, but it doesn't outright kill them, so you'll have to be careful. It'll give you enough time to get away, put some distance between you and the faster ones, and sometimes that's the difference between living and dying."

He gestured vaguely back into the room. "Over on the far wall, near the window, you'll see a whole bunch of test tubes with thin, grey sort of liquid. You need to break the vial, and you let the oxygen hit it, and you can't get any on you- I can't stress that enough. So you throw it, and you run, or at least get to higher ground where they can't climb and reach you. If there's a lot of them, just run. Don't even try to get a sample, because I can't guarantee it'll take them all at once. If you get a straggler, great, just wait for the gas to take it down. Then grab the sample and run."

Cauthrien nodded, looking back and seeing what she assumed were the vials. It all sounded easy enough. Easier than expected. She might not even have to worry about getting samples quickly after death, though she'd feel far better with a bullet through its head.

"I can do that," she said. "How many do you need?"

"Whatever you can grab, Princess," he said softly. "As much as I need to solve this, it isn't worth your life just because you think you're invincible. Or that you have something to prove to me. Because you're not, and you don't. Out of anyone in this wretched country, I think you are the most capable person I've met in a long time."

He hesitated, confusion flashing over his expression before he shook himself. He took a deep breath. "Look, sweetheart, I think... I think it's better to just... uh... I'm going to give you a little space for the next couple of hours. Until you have clothes again at least. Just... let me know when you're heading out... or something. I'll be in my room."

"Of course," she said, and a piece of her wanted desperately to apologize to him. But _I'm sorry_ felt odd in her throat and on her lips and had been hard enough to get out the first time, so instead she only retreated, leaving him by the door and going to check her clothing, bare feet padding soft on the lab floor.

 _I'm sorry_ , she thought again. Whatever he was feeling didn't entirely make sense to her beyond jokes and stereotypes, but that didn't mean she didn't feel embarrassed, more than just a little. She swallowed, picking up her pants and shifting them, turning them over to help them dry. She heard him leave, footsteps more audible than her own, and she sighed, shoulders bowing. This was not how she had planned any of it. This was nothing like how she had expected to find her redemption.

Stupid Cauthrien - of course redemption would come in a way as strange or stranger than the initial disgrace. Redemption, by its very nature, couldn't be easy.

Clothes checked, she went to the rack of vials, thumbing over them. At least when she went down to scavenge for some dignity, she'd have help. She ran over what he had told her. _Slow down the virus_. Break the glass, let it hit the air, and it'd become a gas. If she used it right, it wouldn't be hard at all to get what she needed. If she used it right-

Cauthrien's hand stilled.

She tried to remember if, in the alley, Justice had seemed to slow, or if he'd tried to run from the vial when he had dropped it. _Had_ he? He carried the virus, and by his own admittance it was alive and squirming in his veins. Better, if it worked, than clubbing him over his head and dragging him off.

And even if he would let her stay and let her help _here_ , she was sure Denerim was the better option if only they could get there, sure that he was needlessly paranoid. Uldred had been allowed to do whatever he needed to do. It had- backfired, and it had been under a different government, but she would fight for Justice. She would protect him, if it came down to that.

She just had to get him in some kind of vehicle.

Cauthrien's fingers closed around one of the vials as she pulled it from its rack, gazing down at it. Throwing it in the lab could ruin his work, she was sure. He had told her to avoid contact with the liquid inside the vial. What would it do to her on contact in a small, closed space?

But if the liquid could be injected, just a little bit-

Would that be enough?

Her eyes drifted to his IV stand, heart thudding in her chest. A day ago, an hour ago, this would have felt like necessity, like work, but now there was an unpleasant edge of guilt seeping in - personal guilt. Guilt of betraying a single person. A single, paranoid, brilliant person-

With a hiss, she stalked across the lab, looking for a needle.

She could do this.

She _would_ do this.


End file.
